The UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has published an ambitious new roadmap for environmental reporting in aviation, aiming to strengthen transparency, improve data quality, and support effective policy-making as the sector works towards sustainability targets.
Aviation delivers significant economic and social benefits, from connecting businesses and people to fostering trade and tourism. Yet the CAA acknowledges it also carries substantial environmental costs. To tackle these, robust tracking of aviation’s climate, noise and air quality impacts is essential — not only to monitor progress, but also to empower consumers and stakeholders to make informed decisions.
Central to the CAA’s initiative is the deployment of a new emissions database, which will allow for more effective analysis of aircraft emissions. This underpins improvements to the UK Aviation Environmental Review (AER), which the CAA intends to publish annually.
The AER was last published in 2023. A consultation held last year revealed strong public support for expanding the report’s scope — especially with respect to broader climate change metrics, noise, air quality, and biodiversity.
The new roadmap, running through 2025 to 2029, sets out several key enhancements:
- Improved evidence base: Faster reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, expanded airport noise analysis, and air quality reporting around airports.
- Greater data granularity: Breaking down environmental information more precisely — for example, by separating emissions from flights departing, arriving, and overflying the UK.
- Better accessibility and clarity: An interactive AER section on the CAA website, clearer presentation of environmental data.
While the roadmap provides a firm foundation, the CAA concedes that uncertainties remain. New measurement methods and evolving policy demands mean the reporting framework must retain flexibility. Research into emerging metrics continues, and the CAA expects that future advances may prompt further changes to the roadmap.
Public concern about the environmental consequences of aviation is high, the CAA emphasises, and demands for accountability are growing. In response, the Authority hopes that its enhanced reporting will not only allow the industry to track progress more reliably, but also highlight areas where policy needs to go further.
