Ready for take off: Airline engagement with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

The global community has aligned themselves with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Airlines could play an important role in achieving these as they facilitate air travel, offer employment opportunities, and provide other socio-economic benefits. On the other hand, air travel generates a series of socially and environmentally adverse effects. Finding a way to magnify the positive impacts and mitigate the negative ones is crucial given the projected growth of this sector. Action towards the SDGs might be a path forward but at present little is known about how individual airlines engage with the SDGs, a gap this research seeks to fill. Using the membership of the International Air Transportation Association (nearly 300 airlines), we examine airline reports, websites, and other published documents for explicit mention of the SDGs. Findings indicate that ∼30% of airlines show various levels of engagement and ∼50% refer to sustainability more broadly. Combining these results with a wide range of variables related to airline action and basic descriptors as well as government policy and regulation, we find that existing sustainability related actions taken by airlines (e.g., reporting to prominent sustainability indices and producing a CSR report) are strongly correlated with higher levels of SDG engagement. In addition, geographical location as well as ownership structure seem to impact engagement. These findings lead us to our main recommendation of developing partnerships across the sector to overcome clear barriers to engaging with the SDGs.