Consumer Environmental Information: Consultation on draft principles for aviation consumer environmental information

Overview

Our 2022 Environmental Sustainability Strategy sets out our role in the provision of environmental information to consumers and the public generally. An essential part of this work is ensuring that consumers can make informed choices about their flight booking selections through relevant, accurate, understandable, comparable and accessible information.

We are developing our policies on how we can work with the industry on consumer environmental information, including designing a set of draft principles for airlines (and other companies that advertise or sell flights) to follow when calculating and providing environmental information to consumers on their flight. Our purpose in developing these principles is to provide guidance for those organisations to calculate and publish environmental information for aviation consumers.

We published a Call for Evidence on this subject in January 2023 to seek views from stakeholders. A summary of responses to that consultation is available, CAP3009: Consumer Environmental Information: Call for Evidence Summary of Responses.

The draft principles set out in this consultation were developed from and informed by the submissions to the Call for Evidence. A summary of key themes of responses to the Call for Evidence, a summary of the consumer research and a link to more information are below.

This consultation seeks views on:

1. whether our draft principles on consumer environmental information will enable consumers to make informed choices about their flights;
2. options for policy implementation of those draft principles; and
3. potential environmental labels for aviation.

For the purposes of this consultation, aviation consumer environmental information relates to the emissions caused by aviation, particularly CO₂ but also non-CO₂ impacts.

This consultation does not include consideration of aviation noise, as the CAA already has longstanding functions and expertise in this area.

We are also doing work on standardising methodologies and verification of outputs in relation to aviation environmental reporting and this will be consulted on separately.

Responses to this consultation can be made either via this consultation or by emailing environment@caa.co.uk.  To help you respond to this consultation, a copy of the questions is available. 

Why your views matter

Your views are important so that we can develop an approach that is well considered and workable, that will be of benefit to consumers and that will be deliverable by the aviation industry and other stakeholders.

We will review all responses to this consultation and your views will inform the next stage of this project.

This is likely to be the publication of final Principles of Aviation Consumer Environmental Information and accompanying guidance.