\n<\/p>\n
Emissions from flying in Europe have now passed pre-pandemic levels, with Ryanair\u2019s carbon footprint 50% higher than in 2019, research has shown.<\/p>\n
Total aviation emissions continue to increase despite industry pledges to decarbonise and the introduction of more fuel-efficient planes, driven by the massive expansion of low-cost carriers.<\/p>\n
According to analysis by thinktank Transport & Environment (T&E), Ryanair\u2019s CO\u2082 emissions alone in 2025 reached 16.6 megatonnes (Mt) of CO\u2082 \u2013 around the same amount as the total annual emissions of a small European country such as Croatia. The airline carried just over 200 million passengers in 2025, compared with 140 million in 2019.<\/p>\n
The entire European aviation sector emitted 195Mt of CO\u2082 in departing flights last year, a 2% increase on levels before Covid paused international travel.<\/p>\n
Although the EU and the UK have tried to manage some of the environmental costs through the emissions trading system (ETS), T&E said the system does not price in most of the sector\u2019s pollution, as it only includes flights entirely within Europe.<\/p>\n
That means long-haul flights on legacy carriers\u2019 aircraft, which burn more fuel, are outside its scope. Airlines operating predominantly within Europe pay more under the system \u2013 Ryanair pays an average of \u20ac50 (\u00a336) a tonne of carbon, while Lufthansa pays about \u20ac20. London-New York traffic alone generated nearly 1.4Mt of CO\u2082 in 2025, but is not drawn into the ETS.<\/p>\n
T&E wants the carbon market extended to all departing flights to raise more public revenue and accelerate aviation\u2019s slow decarbonisation. Such a move, it said, could quadruple the \u20ac4.1bn raised for EU states by 2030, and fund production of sustainable aviation fuel and measures to avoid contrails, the plumes of cloud formed by planes in certain conditions that could exacerbate global heating.<\/p>\n
While the aviation industry has been lobbying to suspend or weaken ETS and other taxes and regulatory requirements on flying during the Middle East crisis, the report found that the carbon market costs were negligible compared with fuel volatility. Jet fuel prices that have roughly doubled from pre-Iran war levels add \u20ac90 a passenger on long-haul flights, compared with just \u20ac3 from following the sustainable aviation fuels mandate.<\/p>\n
\u201cTicket prices are rising because of Europe\u2019s reliance on fossil fuels, not because of the climate measures intended to steer the sector away from them,\u201d Giacomo Miele, author of the T&E analysis, said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAviation emissions hitting a new high is a clear signal that the industry has no intention of cleaning up its act. It is time to stop subsidising fossil fuel dependency and start investing in the future of a sustainable aviation sector.\u201d<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for Ryanair said its greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) were rising as it was Europe\u2019s fastest-growing airline, adding: \u201cAll of this growth takes place at lower fares but on new fuel-efficient aircraft, so our GHG per passenger are falling. Ryanair\u2019s growth is also displacing air travel on less-efficient legacy airlines whose GHG per passenger is much higher than Ryanair\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ryanair said the ETS emissions figures were \u201ccompletely discredited\u201d since they excluded flights operated by airlines who were \u201cindefensibly exempted from their fair share of enviro taxes by Europe\u2019s discriminatory ETS system, which taxes only intra-EU flights while it exempts all flights including the most polluting long-haul flights\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ryanair says that when all flights are included it ranks behind Lufthansa, Air France\/KLM and British Airways owner IAG for total emissions, while having the lowest CO\u2082 emissions a head of the big European airlines, of about 64g a passenger kilometre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Emissions from flying in Europe have now passed pre-pandemic levels, with Ryanair\u2019s carbon footprint 50% higher than in 2019, research has shown. Total aviation emissions continue to increase despite industry pledges to decarbonise and the introduction of more fuel-efficient planes, driven by the massive expansion of low-cost carriers. According to analysis by thinktank Transport &<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49234,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[190,24467,191,896,5583,2225,23291,1168],"class_list":{"0":"post-49233","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-airline","9":"tag-decarbonise","10":"tag-emissions","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-levels","13":"tag-pledge","14":"tag-precovid","15":"tag-top"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/49234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}