Analyzing the Environmental Efficiency of Global Airlines by Continent for Sustainability

Abstract

The study of environmental sustainability in the aviation industry mainly focuses on research targeting specific regions such as the United States, Europe, and China. However, for the environmental sustainability of the aviation industry, global airlines on all continents around the world must implement efficient environmental management. This study divides the world into six continents and attempts to verify environmental efficiency for airlines belonging to each continent. Using data from 2014 to 2018 of 31 global airlines, this study compares environmental efficiency in the aviation industry by continent and individual airline. Data envelopment analysis (DEA), which is actively used in efficiency studies was adopted as an analysis method. We find that, first, airlines in Europe and Russia have the highest environmental efficiency, and airlines in North America and Canada are the second highest, which can be a good benchmark for other airlines. Second, in technical efficiency (TE) values, airlines in Africa and the Middle East and Latin America generally have low efficiency; but, in the airlines in Africa and the Middle East, environmental efficiency is steadily improving slightly. In comparison, airlines in Latin America showed a decrease in environmental efficiency value, requiring a lot of effort and investment to improve efficiency. Third, for airlines in North America and Canada, the scale efficiency (SE) value was the lowest, even though there was a high level of overall environmental efficiency, indicating the need for efficiency improvement through economies of scale. This study has implications, in that, it suggests how airlines can perform efficient environmental management for sustainability according to the continent to which they belong.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Sustainable Aviation in the Middle East: A Study of Two UAE-Based Carriers

“…The sustainability reports of Emirates Airline were found to contain clearly focused sustainability measures and strategies and an ambitious drive to reduce the environmental impacts from their operations using globally accepted honest and transparent accounting and reporting practices [32]. Kim and Son [38] observed that many airlines do not Secondly, there are concerns about local air quality due to aviation; the major types of engine emissions that can have impact on local air quality, which are internationally regulated by ICAO Standards as contained in ICAO Annex 16 Volume II, include emissions from NOx, CO, and UHCs. However, Etihad Airways did not highlight the significance of these emissions in their sustainability report.…”

Evaluating sustainable efficiency of decision-making units considering undesirable outputs: an application to airline using integrated multi-objective DEA-TOPSIS

“…Hence, they proposed and utilized a two-stage network DEA to consider operational and stock market indicators in evaluating nine major international airline companies from 2006 until 2016. Kim and Son ( 2021 ) implemented a DEA approach to investigate the environmental efficiency for airlines belonging to each continent. They considered fuel consumption, operating cost, the number of employees, and the number of fleets as the input and total revenue, revenue passenger kilometers, revenue ton kilometers, passenger load factor, cargo load factor, and CO 2 reduction as the output.…”

China’s Aviation Industry During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The environmental efficiency of Chinese airlines has dropped significantly. This decline is related to a lack of environmentally friendly practices that will increase the sustainability of the industry (Kim & Son, 2021). In this regard, the aviation industry needs environmental stewardship to prevent its business from causing a global ecological decline.…”