Top 3 Approaches to Airport Sustainability

Airports are essential for a global society, in large part because they play a central role in quickly and efficiently transporting both people and cargo. Over the past decades, airport usage and their physical size have continued to grow to accommodate the steeply increasing number of passengers – 4.5 billion in 2019 alone. While this growth was impacted by COVID-19, the upward trend is expected to continue in the long term.

The downside of the industry’s growth is that airports, along with the entire aviation sector, have a considerable carbon footprint. A large airport’s daily electricity and thermal energy use compares to that of a city of 100,000 people, and the global aviation industry as a whole contributes around 2% of total global carbon emissions. This is quite significant for a single industry. With that type of impact, it’s clear that airports must make a serious commitment to reducing their carbon emissions and overall energy use.

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