Making travel to and from airports ‘greener’ could make an important contribution to reducing aviation’s overall carbon footprint. Groundbreaking research is now assessing the potential and working to pinpoint effective and imaginative ways of delivering real progress in this area.
Already accounting for two to three per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, the aviation sector is set to become an even bigger contributor in the years ahead if current trends carry on unchecked. But it isn’t just the aircraft themselves that are the cause. Every day, millions of people travel to and from airports worldwide – and not only to catch flights or meet and see off friends and relatives. Airline employees and other staff working at terminals and associated facilities also account for a significant proportion of these journeys; so do food and fuel deliveries, freight movements and other essential logistical operations.
Now, with funding from the Research Councils UK Energy Programme, a team from the universities of Loughborough, Cranfield and Leeds is quantifying all carbon emissions caused by airport-related travel and identifying options capable of cutting them. Gathering data at Manchester and Robin Hood Doncaster Sheffield Airports, the ultimate aim of the ABC (Airports and Behavioural Change) project is to produce practical recommendations that can be implemented by the aviation industry, airport authorities and policymakers.
Potentially, there are all kinds of strategies and measures that could have a real impact. Encouraging greater use of public transport to access airport terminals is obviously a key area, so options might include setting up online car-share schemes for passengers and employees. So too could siting luggage-drop facilities in city centres, making it easier to travel to airports by bus or train. But there are also more radical possibilities, such as providing audio/video facilities at airports that enable people to see off friends and family from the comfort of their own home.
“It’s important to ensure measures like these will actually work out there in the real world,” says Dr Tim Ryley of Loughborough University, who is leading the project. “So a key objective of ours is to carry out robust market research that will assess whether people would actually be willing to change their travel habits when they need to get to and from an airport.”
The project is due to present its conclusions and recommendations by the end of 2012.