A Holistic Approach to the Environmental Certification of Green Airports

Víctor Fernando Gómez Comendador, Rosa María Arnaldo Valdés and Bernard Lisker
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Víctor Fernando Gómez Comendador: Aerospace System, Air Transport and Airport Department, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain
Rosa María Arnaldo Valdés: Aerospace System, Air Transport and Airport Department, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain
Bernard Lisker: International Directo, MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA 22102, USA

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 15, 1-38

Abstract: Airports around the world are more and more environmentally concerned, increasing their efforts in reducing aviation impacts by applying environmental management, certification systems, or other types of ecological rating systems to their infrastructures and operation. Especially relevant are the airports’ efforts to manage and reduce their CO 2 emissions through Airport Carbon Accreditation, the efforts made by Eurocontrol to encourage collaborative environmental management, or the increasing numbers of airports worldwide that get their terminals certified according to several world-recognized Green Building Rating Standards (GBRS). However, although these standards are state-of-the-art sustainability valuation programs, none of them fully cover all the environmental impacts of aeronautical activity at an airport. This paper presents the results of an exploratory research where the use of a GBRS into a more holistic certification scheme for airports is discussed and areas of challenge are highlighted. The paper seeks to shed some light on the value of holistic approaches from the perspective of maximizing environmental management efficiency and effectiveness, the integration of actions of individual airport partners to potentially encourage greater coordination of efforts, the challenges of dealing with both construction and operational impacts within one scheme, and the accountability difficulties.

Keywords: LEED; Green Airport; sustainable airport (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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