Latest news with #ClaireWaghorn
Forbes
14-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Can An Airport Really Become Green? Christchurch Airport Is Trying
Claire Waghorn, the airport's sustainability transition leader, on the top floor of the Novotel Christchurch Airport. Can an airport be sustainable? Before you answer that question, step outside any terminal and catch a whiff of burning jet fuel — a searing, earthy odor that reminds you air travel is one of the most carbon-intensive industries on the planet. But Christchurch Airport, a small aviation hub on New Zealand's sparsely populated South Island, is determined to flip the script. Over the past two decades, the airport has quietly tried to transform itself into a sustainability innovator — and prove that even in an industry notorious for its environmental impact, meaningful change is possible. "It's a challenge," says Claire Waghorn, the airport's sustainability transition leader. "But we must rise to the challenge." Christchurch Airport has already slashed its operational emissions by 92 percent from a decade ago. And last week, it announced the adoption of a sophisticated new carbon emission tracking system. Now it's tackling the far greater challenge of reducing aircraft emissions. While the path to sustainability is fraught with challenges and occasional missteps, Christchurch Airport's progress offers a possible blueprint for how airports — and perhaps entire industries — can reimagine their environmental impact. An electric bus at Christchurch Airport. Christchurch Airport's approach to sustainability is deeply influenced by Māori principles, particularly the concept of kaitiakitanga, or guardianship. 'It's about recognizing that everything is interconnected,' Waghorn explains. 'We can't address climate change in isolation. We have to consider biodiversity, social equity, and economic resilience as part of the same puzzle. Alongside this, understanding we need to act with intergenerational interests at heart.' This holistic philosophy is reflected in the airport's use of the 'doughnut economics' framework, which balances environmental limits (the outer ring of the doughnut) with social minimum standards (the inner ring). The goal is to operate within these boundaries and ensure that the airport's operations are not at the expense of the planet. Christchurch Airport's sustainability journey began in 2006, long before most airports were even thinking about carbon footprints. Back then, their emissions tracking was rudimentary, but it laid the groundwork for what would become one of the most ambitious decarbonization plans in the aviation industry. By 2015, the airport had a clear road map in place. Since then, it has reduced its operational emissions by 92 percent. How did they do it? 'We've got this little bit left on our own plate,' Waghorn said, referring to the remaining 8 percent of emissions. 'It's things like backup generators and fire extinguishers — tiny amounts that are surprisingly hard to eliminate.' An electric plane recharging at Christchurch Airport. While Christchurch Airport has made steady progress in reducing its own emissions, it's quick to acknowledge the bigger challenge: aircraft emissions. 'Our operational footprint is around 240 tons per year,' Waghorn noted. 'The airlines? Eight hundred thousand tons.' To address this, the airport is positioning itself as a pioneer in the transition to low-carbon aviation. Its strategy focuses on three key technologies: 'Airlines sign contracts for new planes three to four years before delivery," says Waghorn, "but the infrastructure to support them takes seven to eight years to build. It's very challenging. We have to act now, even without certainty about which technologies will dominate.' Sustainability at Christchurch Airport isn't just about cutting emissions. It's also about biodiversity, water conservation, energy efficiency, and rethinking waste. The airport has implemented a robust circular economy program, focusing on materials recovery and reducing single-use plastics. One standout initiative is its waste sorting system. The airport collects everything and sorts it back of house offsite. The results have been staggering: half of what was once considered general waste is now diverted to recycling or composting streams. 'We've also partnered with local organizations to repurpose food waste from our lounges,' Waghorn added. 'It's about finding the best possible outcome for every item that comes through our terminal.' Despite the progress, Christchurch Airport faces its share of challenges and skeptics. For one, sustainability efforts often go unnoticed by passengers. 'A lot of this work happens behind the scenes,' Waghorn acknowledges. 'It's not as tangible as, say, a solar panel or a wind turbine.' Sustainability is not entirely invisible. For example, you might see the airport's solar farm when you taxi for takeoff — it's being built on the southwestern side of the airport. And you might notice electric buses shuttling passengers around the airport and into the city. There have been a few missteps. The airport's attempt to replace milk bottles with milk kegs failed because of timing and fluctuations in milk use. Christchurch Airport's sustainability journey is far from over. With a goal of achieving absolute zero emissions in airport operations by 2035 — no offsets, just real reductions — the facility is pushing the boundaries of what's possible in airports, while continuing to explore how to support and accelerate the wider aviation transition. "It's really, really hard to get consistent behavior from a transient crowd," says Waghhorn. Some of the missteps are funny, in hindsight. Consider the airport's purchase of an electric autonomous shuttle in 2017. Although the shuttle was a bold step toward modernizing airport transportation, it could not be used on the road because it wasn't street-legal. "We learned so much from that," laughs Waghorn. The airport quietly sold the shuttle and transitioned to an electric van driven by a human. The airport's experiences suggest that the path to sustainability is almost never linear. The airport has had to adapt, learn from its errors, and stay focused on the bigger picture, even when faced with setbacks and skepticism. "We always have to keep trying to do more," she says. Christchurch Airport's sustainability journey is far from over. With a goal of achieving absolute zero emissions by 2035 — no offsets, just real reductions — the facility is pushing the boundaries of what's possible in airports. But perhaps its greatest contribution lies in its willingness to share its successes — and failures. 'Collaboration is everything,' Waghorn says. 'We can't do this alone. It's about working with airports, airlines, manufacturers, energy providers, and communities to create a shared vision for the future.' For travelers, Christchurch Airport offers a glimmer of hope. It's proof that even in an industry as carbon-intensive as aviation, sustainability is not just a buzzword. It's a tangible, achievable goal. And while the road ahead is long and filled with pitfalls, the airport's progress serves as a reminder that every step, no matter how small, may bring us closer to a sustainable future.
Scoop
12-06-2025
- Business
- Scoop
Christchurch Airport Sets Global Precedent In Aviation Emissions Monitoring
Press Release – Christchurch Airport A key part of Christchurch Airports sustainability journey has been tracking and reducing their own on-the-ground airport operational emissions. This new tool builds on that work by offering advanced insights into aviation-related emissions from aircraft … Christchurch Airport has taken another step forward in its sustainability journey, becoming the first airport in the world to adopt a new hi-tech emissions tracking platform. The move strengthens the airport's position as a global leader in climate action. Traditionally, flight emissions data has been gathered annually, and split into categories such a domestic, regional and international. As the first airport in the Southern Hemisphere to achieve Level 5 in the Airport Carbon Accreditation programme, the Airport is now using the PACE Airports platform to better understand the emissions generated from flights in greater detail. This helps to inform data-led conversations and the longer-term transition requirements for the airline partners coming into Christchurch Airport. A key part of Christchurch Airport's sustainability journey has been tracking and reducing their own on-the-ground airport operational emissions. This new tool builds on that work by offering advanced insights into aviation-related emissions from aircraft using their airport. Analysing these emissions at a more granular level helps better understand the transition challenges facing the wider aviation sector. The platform delivers up-to-date emissions data covering over 99% of commercial flights worldwide, tracking more than 370,000 individual routes and utilising over 10 billion flight data points. The system calculates emissions down to the type of engines an aircraft is using and can be tailored to local conditions. Claire Waghorn, Sustainability Transition Leader at Christchurch Airport, said: 'Our key focus on this sustainability journey has been reducing our own operational emissions and then seeking to support our wider sector reductions. The insight from this platform offers us data to consider the aviation-related emissions across the entire airport operations.' The innovative system, PACE Airports has been developed by Fexco, an Irish global fintech and financial services company. Christchurch Airport is the first airport in the world to adopt the system, which is already trusted by leading banks and aviation financiers to track aviation-related emissions across the global aviation sector. Bertie Murphy, Chief Strategy Officer at Fexco Group, said: 'We're excited to have Christchurch Airport, a sustainability leader, utilise our platform. We strive to be the trusted source of aviation emissions data. We look forward to helping Christchurch Airport achieve its emissions reduction targets with our data and insights'.
Scoop
12-06-2025
- Business
- Scoop
Christchurch Airport Sets Global Precedent In Aviation Emissions Monitoring
A key part of Christchurch Airports sustainability journey has been tracking and reducing their own on-the-ground airport operational emissions. This new tool builds on that work by offering advanced insights into aviation-related emissions from aircraft … Christchurch Airport has taken another step forward in its sustainability journey, becoming the first airport in the world to adopt a new hi-tech emissions tracking platform. The move strengthens the airport's position as a global leader in climate action. Traditionally, flight emissions data has been gathered annually, and split into categories such a domestic, regional and international. As the first airport in the Southern Hemisphere to achieve Level 5 in the Airport Carbon Accreditation programme, the Airport is now using the PACE Airports platform to better understand the emissions generated from flights in greater detail. This helps to inform data-led conversations and the longer-term transition requirements for the airline partners coming into Christchurch Airport. A key part of Christchurch Airport's sustainability journey has been tracking and reducing their own on-the-ground airport operational emissions. This new tool builds on that work by offering advanced insights into aviation-related emissions from aircraft using their airport. Analysing these emissions at a more granular level helps better understand the transition challenges facing the wider aviation sector. The platform delivers up-to-date emissions data covering over 99% of commercial flights worldwide, tracking more than 370,000 individual routes and utilising over 10 billion flight data points. The system calculates emissions down to the type of engines an aircraft is using and can be tailored to local conditions. Claire Waghorn, Sustainability Transition Leader at Christchurch Airport, said: 'Our key focus on this sustainability journey has been reducing our own operational emissions and then seeking to support our wider sector reductions. The insight from this platform offers us data to consider the aviation-related emissions across the entire airport operations.' The innovative system, PACE Airports has been developed by Fexco, an Irish global fintech and financial services company. Christchurch Airport is the first airport in the world to adopt the system, which is already trusted by leading banks and aviation financiers to track aviation-related emissions across the global aviation sector. Bertie Murphy, Chief Strategy Officer at Fexco Group, said: 'We're excited to have Christchurch Airport, a sustainability leader, utilise our platform. We strive to be the trusted source of aviation emissions data. We look forward to helping Christchurch Airport achieve its emissions reduction targets with our data and insights'. By using PACE Airports, Christchurch Airport continues to set the standard for sustainable airport operations.
Scoop
11-06-2025
- Business
- Scoop
Christchurch Airport Sets Global Precedent In Aviation Emissions Monitoring
Christchurch Airport has taken another step forward in its sustainability journey, becoming the first airport in the world to adopt a new hi-tech emissions tracking platform. The move strengthens the airport's position as a global leader in climate action. Traditionally, flight emissions data has been gathered annually, and split into categories such a domestic, regional and international. As the first airport in the Southern Hemisphere to achieve Level 5 in the Airport Carbon Accreditation programme, the Airport is now using the PACE Airports platform to better understand the emissions generated from flights in greater detail. This helps to inform data-led conversations and the longer-term transition requirements for the airline partners coming into Christchurch Airport. A key part of Christchurch Airport's sustainability journey has been tracking and reducing their own on-the-ground airport operational emissions. This new tool builds on that work by offering advanced insights into aviation-related emissions from aircraft using their airport. Analysing these emissions at a more granular level helps better understand the transition challenges facing the wider aviation sector. The platform delivers up-to-date emissions data covering over 99% of commercial flights worldwide, tracking more than 370,000 individual routes and utilising over 10 billion flight data points. The system calculates emissions down to the type of engines an aircraft is using and can be tailored to local conditions. Claire Waghorn, Sustainability Transition Leader at Christchurch Airport, said: 'Our key focus on this sustainability journey has been reducing our own operational emissions and then seeking to support our wider sector reductions. The insight from this platform offers us data to consider the aviation-related emissions across the entire airport operations.' The innovative system, PACE Airports has been developed by Fexco, an Irish global fintech and financial services company. Christchurch Airport is the first airport in the world to adopt the system, which is already trusted by leading banks and aviation financiers to track aviation-related emissions across the global aviation sector. Bertie Murphy, Chief Strategy Officer at Fexco Group, said: 'We're excited to have Christchurch Airport, a sustainability leader, utilise our platform. We strive to be the trusted source of aviation emissions data. We look forward to helping Christchurch Airport achieve its emissions reduction targets with our data and insights'. By using PACE Airports, Christchurch Airport continues to set the standard for sustainable airport operations.
Irish Times
05-06-2025
- Irish Times
What can Irish aviation learn from the carbon-reducing experience of New Zealand?
'We've reduced our Scope One and Scope Two emissions by 94 per cent since we started, so we're down now to a footprint of 280 tonnes.' Those are the words of Claire Waghorn, the sustainable transition leader of Christchurch Airport in New Zealand , which has just been awarded Level 5 status of Airport Carbon Accreditation, the highest level yet awarded. What does all that mean? Aviation and air travel are going to be one of the hardest sectors of our economy to decarbonise. It's more or less physically impossible to take a big, or even a medium, jet aircraft and make it electric. The physics just won't let you. Keep the aircraft light enough to fly and you won't have enough battery power to get much farther than the airport car park. Put in enough batteries and the aircraft will be too heavy to even get off the ground. New Zealand, like Ireland, is utterly dependent on air transport for anyone who wants to go to another country, or visit from one. Indeed, it could be said to be even more dependent on aviation: at least in Ireland you can catch a ferry, however slow it might be, to Britain or France. In New Zealand if you're on a ferry you're just going to another part of New Zealand. The challenges involved in getting the carbon out of flying are simply enormous. To get to net-zero emissions by 2050, the world's airlines will need an estimated 450 billion litres of sustainable aviation fuel, made from a mixture of biofuels and hydrogen combined with carbon. Right now, only 125 million litres or so are being made each year, an almost literal drop in the ocean. READ MORE Given that, you'd expect Waghorn to be downcast about the prospects but nothing could be farther from the truth. 'It's not without its massive challenges' she admits to The Irish Times. 'Some of those are behavioural, in that we've got a whole bunch of people who've become very used to the accessibility of flying and they have an expectation that they deserve that as part of their lifestyles. 'Then we have the debates over electrification versus sustainable aviation fuel. But the way I see it is that these are all challenges, but none of them are technical impossibilities. What they do have is a lack of prioritising. 'I believe that it's not impossible, but we're not prioritising it collectively as a society. Equally, I think it's our job to be relentless about where we're trying to get and keeping on, no matter how many barriers pop up, or how devastating the news can be sometimes, in relation to climate inaction, I think it's our job to just keep finding a way to progress.' Christchurch Airport has certainly progressed. When we speak about Scope One and Scope Two emissions, that means the carbon emissions caused by the operations of the airport itself, so essentially those emissions over which an airport authority will have direct control. Scope Three and Four are those emissions from the aircraft and from people travelling to and from the airport, but more on those in a moment. What Waghorn and her team has done is to look at the airport and its operations as a little ecosystem of its own, and to start working on each piece, bit by bit. So 400 hectares of airport land have been given over to a solar farm, which is due to produce 170 megawatts of electricity. The airport itself uses about 5MW, so this is power that can be used by the surrounding community or it could, potentially, be directed to the production of sustainable aviation fuel at some point, using that electricity to separate hydrogen from water, and combine it with captured carbon – the Holy Grail of liquid fuel energy. Christchurch has formed a 'hydrogen consortium' with Air New Zealand to begin work on just that. Production is, if at all, a long, long way off but right now the airport and the airline are starting to work out what's needed, and where the building blocks need to be put in place. That's big-picture stuff but, as Waghorn says, there has been action on smaller items, such as replacing diesel generators with heat pumps, and swapping out 18 of their 19-strong ground-support vehicle fleet for electrically-powered vehicles. Even the Christchurch Airport fire service isn't immune from the transition – one electric fire truck is already in service, and more will follow. 'What served us really well was a framework where the responsibility rested with the different business units. Every part of the business had to answer to what they could impact or what they could take action on to lower our emissions' said Waghorn. One thing that Christchurch has not done is to impose a passenger cap. As the DAA , which runs Dublin Airport , points out, the will-it/won't-it passenger cap in Dublin isn't strictly speaking about emissions, it's about infrastructure and noise, but it's not difficult to envisage a carbon justification for a similar cap in years to come. It's a difficult decision that may well have to be made at some point. Waghorn says capping may have to be done but it needs to be carefully considered. 'We talked about a passenger cap at Christchurch' she says. 'But we also talked about the challenge of unintended consequences, such as instead of people flying to Christchurch, they just fly to Auckland or Queenstown instead. 'The problem is that when you put on a cap, the danger is that the passengers and the emissions just pop out somewhere else instead. I'm not totally against caps but the reason it hasn't come up as a conversation for us is that we are so utterly reliant on aviation.' Christchurch handles around five to six million passengers a year, compared with Dublin's 33-odd million, but are there lessons to be learned from New Zealand's experience? Perhaps, not least Waghorn's warning that capped passengers (or their emissions) have a habit of finding their way elsewhere in the system. 'That's especially problematic for island nations like us that don't have alternative options such as road and rail' says DAA director of communications Sarah Ryan. 'Plus tourism is one of our biggest indigenous sectors. 'Aircraft are the ultimate movable asset and capping in one place simply moves the emissions elsewhere, along with the jobs, etc that aviation generates. It's recognised that aviation is a hard-to-abate sector but technological improvements and alternative fuels are the way to go to address that, with supports and incentives to encourage it, not caps.' Dublin Airport and Christchurch have previously touched base on this very subject, Ryan says. 'We've previously had conversations with Christchurch on their sustainability approach, and we have found that they share much of the same challenges as us. 'There also seems to be an impression out there that only flights that land in Dublin emit carbon and somehow if they land at a different Irish airport, they don't. Clearly that is not the case. Attempting to duplicate routes at all regional airports rather than concentrating some on one hub which people have good access to is also against sustainability and efficiency principles. 'If you want to look at New Zealand, where I lived for three years in the noughties, there is a lot of intercountry flying as it is such a long country, never mind that it is over two islands. When I lived in Wellington, it was a nine-hour drive to Auckland (642km away); you definitely would want to fly that. Driving from Shannon to Dublin is 223km in comparison.' Dublin Airport recently opened a solar farm of its own, with 15,000 panels contributing a potential seven gigawatt-hours to nine gigawatt-hours annually. Even so, with that and with planned solar expansions, DAA still reckons that only 20 per cent of the airport's power needs will come from solar energy by 2030. With Dublin Airport currently holding a Level 3 Airport Carbon Accreditation rating, and with links to and from the airport still totally reliant on road transport of one form or another, it will clearly be some time before Dublin catches up with Christchurch. And that is before even considering the elephant-shaped cloud in the room: aircraft emissions.
