CAPA Envest Airline Sustainability Benchmarking Review
David Wills is a sustainability business leader and strategic advisor who has over 30 years of industry and sustainability advisory experience. He has an engineering background, starting his career as a refinery engineer followed by a range of technical, management and business leadership roles in industry and consulting. Prior to co-founding Envest Global in 2020, David spent 13 years at CH2M HILL and 14 years at ERM, one of the world’s leading sustainability advisory firms. During his time with ERM he held numerous senior management roles including Managing Director for the Australia, NZ, Indonesia and PNG businesses (2007-13) and Asia Pacific Commercial Director (2015-20). Since establishing Envest Global, his focus has been on supporting companies in the aviation industry adapt to the low carbon economy transition and to achieve net zero carbon emissions through the development and implementation of innovative carbon reduction and investment strategies.
Transcript
David Wills:Thanks for the intro, Marco. At the gala dinner tonight, CAPA will be announcing the winners of a range of sustainability awards, and there's lots of awards out there. And sometimes it's hard to understand whether the award is justified, has a basis or not, and sometimes kind of devalues or hard to know how to respond when people say they got an award for this or that. So I just want to take a couple of minutes to talk a little bit about what sits behind the CAPA awards, and it's actually a long-term research project into the actual performance data of airlines. It's not, not what we're going to do, what we've committed to do, but looking back over the last 12, 18 months, how has each airline performed and looked at through the sustainability lens? How does that airline measure up against its, its, the, the competitors in the industry? And so it really is a recognition of the airlines that are at the, really at the front of this industry's transition to a low-carbon future. So I just want to take a couple of minutes to give you a little bit of a sense, so tonight when you're at the awards event and hearing the winners announced, to think about, well, what does that mean? Why have they got that award? So I can assure you, Marco, there's no spoilers coming here. This is just factual about the process. But as Marco said, our company, Envest Global and CAPA, for 3 years now have researched the performance of airlines, not the marketing messages, not the press releases, the advertising, but the actual data of the performance. So this year, the report that's coming out in a couple of weeks. That is the report that sits behind the awards, looks at the top 100 airlines globally by seat capacity. And if I get— yeah, here we go. Um, so these are a summary of the key metrics that we measure and report for each airline. And so as you can see there, it goes through the different scopes of carbon emission, and then we look at that through passenger kilometre, seat kilometre, and freight tonne kilometre. We look at load factors, fleet age, sector length, fuel use, SAF use. There'll be a lot of talk about SAF this morning, and we will certainly in our panel talk a little more about that as well. We look at carbon offsets. But we also look at it through a range of financial metrics, which is important to understand, not just from a sort of carbon emission point of view, but what's the context of that in terms of how the airline is performing? And then when you look at how far the airline has to go to net zero and what its financial capacity is, it gives you some sense of, I guess, risk or resilience to be able to make that transition. Oops, wrong button. OK, so the other thing is that we rank and rate airlines into categories of performance. And as you can see there on the left, platinum, gold, silver, bronze. I've just summarised the types of characteristics we see within each of the categories, which either— in each of the rating categories, sorry. Just to highlight, I just wanted to focus on one sort of relatively simple metric, CO2 per passenger kilometre. I mean, and for those who flew here today, you can see there, there's a range, and these are averages for airlines within that rating category, from platinum at 66 down to bronze at 114. It's not quite double the carbon, but it's close to it. Best in the industry at the moment is about 55. And so, you know, just heard during the, the previous interview with AirAsia about customers making decisions. Increasingly, we're going to see customers making decisions. And when you get the choice between an airline at 55 versus an airline at 114 grams of CO2 per kilometre, and you're conscious of your carbon footprint, then that's going to factor into your decision. And we're seeing that now increasingly with travel management companies. We're also starting to see it with stakeholders in the industry who are making risk-based decisions about investment, about lending, about insuring, who want to understand the relative strength from a sustainability point of view of all of the airlines that they are considering investing in, using, etc. So I won't say any more, but tonight during the awards Some of the data for the winning airlines will be shown on the board, and this may give you some context for it. If you've got any questions, certainly I'll be around to answer them, but the key message really is that the award winners tonight are really representative of some of the best, most sustainable airlines in the industry at the moment. So with that, I'd like to invite the, uh, my 4 great panel members to come up, and we'll kick into the discussion. Thank you, David.
Copyright policy: All transcripts on this site are the copyright of CAPA - Centre for Aviation. Our reproduction policy is as follows: you may quote up to 400 words of any transcript on the condition that you attribute the transcript to CAPA - Centre for Aviation and link to the original video page. All other use is prohibited. While we aim for 100% accuracy in the transcript, there may be some minor transcribing errors.