Airports to Earn their Wings by Improving Environmental and Social Impacts Through Greater Transparency

At the peak of the holiday season airports worldwide will handle approximately five billion passenger trips. Environmental impacts such as waste disposal, water usage, green house gas emissions, and biodiversity, along with social impacts such as job safety and working hours, impacts on local communities and neighborhoods, and customer privacy will escalate due to the high volume traffic. Getting people to and from their respective destinations while keeping social and environmental impacts low is a major challenge, but one that airports like Athens, Frankfurt, and Munich have foremost on their radar screens.

These three European airports have joined together to call for the creation of social and environmental (also known as "sustainability") reporting guidelines for the airports industry. Athens, Frankfurt, and Munich Airports are taking a leadership position in an industry not historically known for its openness on these topics. But stakeholders such as industry associations, journalists, airline companies, local authorities, investors, and passengers are no longer content to stand by - they are demanding greater transparency on sustainability issues that impact their lives and businesses.

According to Matthias Linde, Head of Environmental Strategy for the Munich Airport operating company, Flughafen München GmbH (FMG), establishing a common framework for reporting is important because "we want to transport our passengers in the safest and most secure way possible, while also maintaining high environmental and social standards that we can easily communicate through globally understood and accepted sustainability reporting guidelines ."

The airports have turned to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) as the established creator of the most widely used reporting framework for sustainability reporting. Hundreds of companies in all sectors have already used GRI’s main G3 Guidelines as the basis for their reporting. GRI will work with airports and their stakeholders (employees, investors, customers, communities, and others) to create a customized set of reporting indicators specifically for airports to use. The sector indictors will be developed in a consensus seeking process involving interested parties from all corners of the globe.

"GRI is the global language of sustainability" says Pakis Papademetriou, Manager, Corporate Quality at Athens International Airport. "We need to work on adapting these GRI guidelines on the particularities of our business so that we effectively manage, measure and communicate our impact on the natural and social environment. It is not about charity, it is not about boosting the corporate image. It is about applying sound business practices that help ensure our long term success in all aspects of our operation. The best way to strike a balance among stakeholder expectations is to ensure that all the people involved are around the table."

Peter Marx, Vice President Environmental Management at Fraport in Frankfurt says: "As Fraport owns quite a few airports around the world we would like to be able to use sector specific reporting guidelines that are globally applicable. Stakeholder concerns are similar around the world but in some countries emphasis on certain concerns lay differently."

Sustainability reports based on the GRI reporting guidelines enable users to compare company performance, and have been used in other sectors as more than a communications platform but also a management tool for the integration of sustainability strategies into overall business processes. The airport industry becomes the latest segment of the global transportation infrastructure to take up the sustainability challenge behind others such as logistics and automotive which have already worked with GRI to create sector specific reporting guidance.