According to Ardian, a private investment house, Ardian AirCarbon is the first platform showing average daily carbon emissions per country and aircraft efficiency indicators for most commercial airports worldwide.
Ardian AirCarbon has been developed by Ardian's data science and IT teams in close collaboration with the company’s portfolio airport teams to support the Scope 3 emissions dynamic assessment at airports where the infrastructure team is an investor. Scope 3 is estimated to represent more than 95% of an airport’s emissions as it covers all indirect emissions, such as those generated by an aircraft landing, take-off and taxiing, or airport ground vehicles.
The platform uses granular, real-time operations data to quantify and project emissions. This enables airport operators to effectively monitor and reduce their CO2 emissions. Following successful use by the airports and enquiries from non-Ardian owned airports to access the platform, it was decided to provide Ardian AirCarbon more broadly. The platform is currently deployed in five airports across Europe (Keflavík, Milan Malpensa, Milan Linate, Naples and Turin) and covers a total of 59 million yearly passengers.
This new version of Ardian AirCarbon is open to everyone and aims to monitor, on a global scale, the progress made on the decarbonisation trajectories for the aviation industry. The platform will thus provide open access to the aggregated Scope 3 carbon emissions of airports within each country, alongside more in-depth aircraft efficiency indicators such as the proportion of high, medium and low fuel efficiency aircraft in the overall aircraft mix of an airport at any given date. It complies with recommended methodology from the Airport Carbon Accreditation (ACA), the global certification programme for airport carbon management.
Ardian AirCarbon has already been used by airports to reach important sustainability and net-zero reporting milestones. For example, in 2024, Milan's SEA airports used the platform to renew their ACA 4+ certification. This was the first time it had been used by an airport to report half-cruise flight emissions to the ACA.
The goal is for the platform to become a tool for the entire airport ecosystem and to support the aviation sector in achieving net-zero.
“Making Ardian AirCarbon open and available to all stakeholders is an important step in supporting the transition to a more sustainable industry. As a long-term investor and shareholder in airports, it is our duty to help secure the future of aviation for the next generations and to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. We look forward to working with the entire aviation ecosystem to control emissions, because collectively we need to act now,” said Mathias Burghardt, executive vice president and head of infrastructure, Ardian.
