What would you be doing if you were in Cancun at 8pm on a Friday night? Odds on you wouldn’t be sitting in a convention centre waiting for a meeting to start, but that is what I and around 12,000 other people are doing right now as we wait for the Cancun Climate Talks to [...]

Last week, I wrote about how the least developed nations of the world believe they can prepare themselves for the impact that climate change will have on their lives. This blog has concentrated a lot on how our industry is working together to reduce our contribution to climate change. But it is also important to [...]

At one of the pre-meetings of the December’s Copenhagen climate change summit, a group of 50 least-developed countries has suggested to the world community that international aviation be slapped with an ‘adaptation levy’ to help fund the work that they need to do to mitigate the effects of climate change on their homelands. One must [...]

Jennifer Holmgren, Honeywell UOP, speaking about aviation biofuels at the Summit (Photo by Justin Hession/Getty for the Air Transport Action Group) We’re getting to the end of the day and it has been tremendously exciting to see all the delegates interacting and listening to the comments from the sessions. One of the major topics focused [...]

Videos from the Opening Session of the Aviation & Environment Summit 2009 are available. Alexander ter Kuile from CANSO called for greater cooperation and set out airspace efficiency targets. Angela Gittens, Director General of Airports Council International, spoke about airports’ environmental work. Francois Gayet, Chair of the International Coordinating Council of Aerospace Industries Associations (ICCAIA) [...]

Some interesting figures have emerged about the effect of the new flight tax in the Netherlands. Introduced on 1 July 2008, supposedly to counter the CO2 impact of Dutch aviation (though of course not a cent goes towards environmental action) the tax added between 11 and 45 Euros to the cost of an air ticket. [...]

It is not often that I praise the UK Government’s stance on aviation and the environment. This is a government that collects over 2 billion pounds a year from Air Passenger Duty, ostensibly for environmental reasons but puts none of the revenue back into the environment. And it ignores the fact that the tax does [...]

As a Brit living in Geneva I always enjoy my trips to London. This week I popped into the Science Museum to see its exhibition on aviation and the environment called ‘Does Flying Cost the Earth?‘ I hadn’t been to the Science Museum since I was an eight year-old living in London and I had [...]

Last Friday was a busy day for my colleagues in New Zealand and on the West Coast of the USA, as the first-ever ASPIRE flight took off. ASPIRE stands for Asia and South Pacific Initiative to Reduce Emissions, and the primary actors are the ANSPs Airways New Zealand, Air Services Australia, and the Federal Aviation [...]