Consumer Environmental Information: Call for Evidence

Overview

This Call for Evidence seeks views on what environmental information should be provided to people when they are looking for and booking flights, and how that information can be presented in a way that is meaningful and enables people to make informed choices about their travel options.

For the purposes of this Call for Evidence, environmental information includes the emissions caused by aviation (both CO₂ and non-CO₂) and how consumer information is and could be provided on those emissions.

This Call for Evidence does not focus on aviation noise, but the CAA has expertise and functions on aviation noise.

Please see CAP2395 Consumer Environmental Information: Call for Evidence for more information on this Call for Evidence including a list of questions, the context, next steps and examples of aviation consumer environmental information and international aviation environmental activity.

This consultation will close on 7 April 2023. We cannot take into account comments received after this date. We will assume that all responses can be published once the consultation has closed. There is an option within the questionnaire to request for your name to remain private, but in any event your email address will never be published.

Please submit your comments using the survey link below. 

Why your views matter

Our Environmental Sustainability Strategy highlights the significant connectivity, economic and cultural benefits of aviation, but recognises that its environmental impacts must be addressed. A successful aviation sector is an important part of an open, trading United Kingdom but, as the government’s Jet Zero Strategy states, the argument is not that aviation is too important to change, but that it’s too important not to change. The Jet Zero Strategy is not intended to limit the aviation sector, but instead to future-proof it so that passengers can look forward to more sustainable travel.  One way to help address this is by providing reliable and trustworthy information to passengers about the climate impact of aviation so that they can make more informed decisions on their travel options. 

We carried out deliberative consumer research in 2021 which supported our view that consumers want more environmental information that they can trust about the impact of their flights on the environment. We know that there are many organisations, including airlines, international trade associations and internet flight search engines, working on different ways of providing such environmental information. However, there does not appear to be a standard approach to what information is provided or how it is presented. Passengers can find several different calculations of how much emissions a flight might produce (and their individual share of that total), with little or no explanation of why a flight on one airline appears to have a significantly different climate impact than another on the same route. There is also little explanation of what the information means in practice. Most organisations present the information as “x kg CO₂ per person per flight” but there is no comparator information to put this into context. This means that people cannot make fully informed decisions on their travel options or on whether they can take additional measures (such as offsetting) to reduce the impact of their flight. This increases the risk that people will not trust the information and so ignore it. 

Our objective is to ensure that people can find:

• reliable information,
• at the point of looking for and booking flights,
• using a standard approach and data,
• in a format that is understandable, contextualised and accessible,

which will give them the confidence to make decisions on whether and how they travel.

This Call for Evidence is the first step in achieving this goal. We are seeking evidence in relation to the presentation and content of consumer environmental information, and the methodologies used for calculating the impact of a flight, to get a comprehensive picture of what information is available, how it is analysed and presented, and what improvements can be made to this provision.

We are also interested in any insights on consumers’ preferences and feedback on this issue, and what people are using environmental information for. In addition, we are seeking responses on how to ensure information is available and accessible to all including people who use tools such a screen reader or magnifier or who may not have access to the internet. 

Using this evidence, we will consider whether we should: 

1)     recommend an existing methodology; 
2)     develop a standard methodology ourselves; or
3)     propose standard requirements for organisations to agree to use for their own methodologies. 

We may also propose guidelines for the presentation of consumer environmental information by airlines, travel agents, flight comparison websites, trade associations and other providers of consumer environmental information. 

We currently do not consider that we should be publishing consumer environmental information ourselves on our website as it is likely to be more useful if readily available when a consumer is looking for or booking flights. However we want to work towards a standard methodology (and potential presentation format) for airlines and other publishers of aviation consumer environmental information.
 

What happens next

This consultation closed on 6 April 2023. We cannot take into account comments received after this date. We will update this page with a summary of responses in due course.