Option 1: The CAA publishes the principles as a guidance document, asks airlines and other organisations that sell or advertise flights to follow them and monitors uptake. This option is based on a light touch, voluntary approach.
Option 2: The CAA publishes the principles as a guidance document and uses its powers to gather relevant information from airlines and others, which in turn enables the CAA to assess how those organisations are conforming with them and use that information to publish a report on uptake. This reporting could be done through our existing annual reporting of the industry’s environmental performance and could also include verification of the information provided to passengers. This is our preferred option as it incentivises industry to follow the principles without creating an overly complex data gathering and reporting regime.
Option 3: The CAA publishes the principles as a policy decision and uses its powers to gather relevant data from airlines. The CAA would then calculate and publish average CO2e emissions for key routes only, using either an existing methodology or developing its own. This more direct approach would provide some limited baseline information to passengers which they could compare to the information provided by the airline or booking agency when searching for and booking a flight. This approach would involve detailed consideration of how that baseline information can be calculated and would require more intensive data gathering and analysis.
Option 4: The CAA publishes the principles as a policy decision and uses its powers to gather relevant data from airlines to calculate the carbon footprint of all individual scheduled flights, using either an existing methodology or developing one itself. The CAA could then either publish the information itself and / or ask airlines to publish it with their ticketing/scheduling info. This would be a more intensive approach for both airlines and the CAA that would enable consistency of information across flights booked in the UK but may not be consistent with approaches taken elsewhere.
