Source · Select Committees · Environmental Audit Committee
Recommendation 9
9
Deferred
Impose air quality limits around airports and mandate measures for no net pollution increase.
Recommendation
The Government, when updating the Airports National Policy Statement, should impose air quality limits for areas surrounding airports covering all key air quality pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and particulate matter. Having established those limits, government should require that any airport expansion is accompanied by measures to ensure no consequential net increase in air pollution including mitigating against the impact of road traffic growth surrounding airports. In response to this report, the Government must set out what measures it will put in place, including the level of pollution it deems acceptable, and how it will ensure they are met. (Recommendation, Paragraph 50)
Government Response Summary
The government deflects the recommendation for air quality limits and pollution mitigation around airports by detailing its Non-CO2 Research and Development Programme and Contrails Impact Mitigation Task and Finish Group, focusing on non-CO2 climate impacts rather than local air quality.
Government Response
Deferred
HM Government
Deferred
The Government recognises that aviation has both CO2 emissions and non-CO2 climate impacts that need to be addressed. However, there is significant uncertainty about the interaction of non-CO2 effects with the atmosphere and therefore the nature and magnitude of their impact on the climate. The Government’s focus to date has therefore been on better understanding these impacts and on identifying and developing potential mitigation options. In 2023, a cross-government Non-CO2 Research and Development Programme was launched, worth up to £29 million over a four-year period. To date, the Programme has awarded funding to 13 projects for academic and industry-led research worth nearly £20 million, some of which are investigating the climate impact of contrails and contrail modelling technology. The Government plans to fund further projects over the Programme’s lifespan. In addition to this, under the Jet Zero Taskforce, the DfT launched a Contrails Impact Mitigation Task and Finish Group to assess the feasibility of contrail avoidance measures as a potential mitigation option for addressing aviation’s non-CO2 impacts, as well as to better understand trade-offs with potential additional CO2 emissions. The findings will be published in due course and will be used to inform future policy development and research. There is currently no agreed consensus on what metric or time horizon should be used to measure aviation’s non-CO2 impacts, and how their global warming effects compare to CO2. The Non-CO2 Research and Development Programme is funding a project on metrics, and its findings will help inform decisions on how Government and the sector should account for, and assess, aviation’s overall climate impact.