What can Irish aviation learn from the carbon-reducing experience of New Zealand?

Irish Times

05-06-2025

'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.
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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.