Abstract
Airports around the world are more and more environmentally concerned, increasing their efforts in reducing aviation impacts by applying environmental management, certification systems, or other types of ecological rating systems to their infrastructures and operation. Especially relevant are the airports’ efforts to manage and reduce their CO2 emissions through Airport Carbon Accreditation, the efforts made by Eurocontrol to encourage collaborative environmental management, or the increasing numbers of airports worldwide that get their terminals certified according to several world-recognized Green Building Rating Standards (GBRS). However, although these standards are state-of-the-art sustainability valuation programs, none of them fully cover all the environmental impacts of aeronautical activity at an airport. This paper presents the results of an exploratory research where the use of a GBRS into a more holistic certification scheme for airports is discussed and areas of challenge are highlighted. The paper seeks to shed some light on the value of holistic approaches from the perspective of maximizing environmental management efficiency and effectiveness, the integration of actions of individual airport partners to potentially encourage greater coordination of efforts, the challenges of dealing with both construction and operational impacts within one scheme, and the accountability difficulties.
Highlights
The interest of industry in ecological certification systems that give an indication of the companies’ commitment to the environment has grown in the recent years [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Orange: Criteria marked in orange are partially covered by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards, the practices and solutions applicable at the airport differ from those applied at other buildings and, the evaluation criteria are specific to the new green airport certification method
The rating system proposed in this paper, which we call “Green Airport”, is directed at those companies whose business is the management of airports and/or the provision of air navigation services, and may be obtained for the following cases: It must be noted that yellow and orange criteria differ greatly in the new aviation system compared to the original LEED model
Summary
The interest of industry in ecological certification systems that give an indication of the companies’ commitment to the environment has grown in the recent years [1,2,3,4,5,6]. It should aim to cooperatively integrate and maximize the efforts and resources of the different stakeholders, airport managers, air navigation services providers, and third companies providing services and running industrial activities within the airport environment, such as handling agents, as well as the own users and passengers. To achieve this holistic approach the paper acknowledges the limits and overlaps of the three main airport environmental frameworks nowadays: ACI’s Carbon Accreditation Scheme, Eurocontrol CEM, and Green Building Rating Standards (GBRS). By benchmarking the best practices in the airport community, researchers develop a rating system to fill the gaps in current GRBS for an airport environment
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