Skift Take

Pressure is growing on airlines to reduce their carbon emissions. But how do you do that when you burn through gallons of jet fuel? Our analysis found that airlines have made good progress in becoming more fuel efficient, but have a long way to go to make significant reductions in emissions long-term.

The airline industry faces increasing pressures to reduce its carbon emissions. Aviation contributes about 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and while far from the most polluting industry, it is receiving more and more public scrutiny and needs to clean up its act.

In Sustainability in Travel 2021: Environmental Performance of the Six Largest Airlines we use the short, medium, and long-term targets of the International Air Transport Association for emission reductions to analyze how some of the largest airline companies stack up to emission reduction targets.

The report investigates the performance of Air France-KLM, American Airlines, Delta Airlines, International Airlines Group, Lufthansa, and United Airlines. Find out which company performed best, and which is the highest polluter, by subscribing to Skift Research.

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What You’ll Learn From This Report

  • The airline company leaders and laggards in emission reduction.
  • How the aviation industry tracks and reports its emissions, and how this can be improved.
  • The targets set to reduce emissions by airline bodies and individual airlines.
  • How close the largest airlines are to achieving short-, medium-, and long-term goals.
  • The shortcomings of current metrics and initiatives to meet medium- and long-term goals.

Subscribe to Skift Research Reports
This is the latest in a series of reports and data products that Skift Research puts out to help you understand the trends in the travel industry. Tap into the opinions and insights of our seasoned network of staffers and contributors. Over 200 hours of desk research, data collection, and/or analysis goes into each report.

After you subscribe, you will gain access to our entire vault of reports conducted on topics ranging from technology to marketing strategy to deep dives on key travel brands. You will also be able to access our proprietary Skift Recovery Index and Skift Health Score data and reports.

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Tags: air france-klm, airlines, american airlines, carbon emissions, climate change, delta air lines, environment, iag, iata, lufthansa, skift research, sustainability, united airlines

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