EUROCONTROL Data Snapshot on CO2 emissions from flights in 2020

Travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic led to much-reduced CO₂ emissions from flights across Europe in 2020, down 56.9% on 2019. Following global standards, all CO₂ emissions from a flight are assigned to the country of departure. These departing flights declined by a similar amount to CO₂: 54.5% compared to 2019 overall.

Our data shows that there was considerable variation between countries in their CO₂ reductions, driven by differences in the local fleet, flight distances, mix of market segments, and by the extent of the COVID-19 decline in flights.