This report examines whether a third runway at Heathrow Airport is compatible with the UK’s domestic and international legal climate change obligations, and shows how growing airport capacity before climate technologies succeed will break the UK’s carbon budget.
Through an analysis of future UK aviation scenarios and reviewing the status and outlook for key technology options, our new report presents findings that show Heathrow expansion cannot reasonably be considered consistent with UK Government climate targets.
This report looks at three principal questions: the level of demand implied by an expanded Heathrow Airport; whether sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) can mitigate emissions arising from any net additional demand; and if greenhouse gas removal (GGR) expansion can address remaining additional residual emissions. This assessment is within the context of the UK’s Seventh Carbon Budget, which is a legally binding limit on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in the period when the third runway is proposed to start operating.
The findings show that under serious efforts to meet legal climate targets, the infrastructure for large-scale UK SAF production and GGR should be operational prior to the infrastructure to expand aviation demand, and use of the latter contingent on the former.
Through analysis of aviation’s contribution to GHG emissions across different scenarios, and by reviewing the current state of SAF and GGR development, this report concludes that demand management must remain central to meeting UK climate obligations. A third runway at Heathrow enables demand growth and fails the Government’s climate test for airport expansion by posing a substantial risk to meeting statutory climate commitments.
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Can we expand Heathrow with a third runway and meet our legally binding climate targets? This was a question that we set out to answer in our piece of work – and on this basis, on this evidence, a third runway at Heathrow should not be approved.
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Authors
This report was written by Dr Lois Pennington, Dr Chris Jones, Professor Alice Larkin and Dr Diarmaid Clery at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester. It includes a foreword by Professor Kevin Anderson.
Funders
This work was commissioned and funded by Friends of the Earth.
