Airline
emissions in Europe top pre-Covid levels despite pledge to decarbonise
Promises
to cut emissions and use more fuel-efficient planes fail to stop rise, with
Ryanair’s carbon footprint 50% up on 2019
Gwyn
Topham Transport correspondent
Fri 8 May
2026 11.30 BST
Emissions
from flying in Europe have now passed pre-pandemic levels, with Ryanair’s
carbon footprint 50% higher than in 2019, research has shown.
Total
aviation emissions continue to increase despite industry pledges to decarbonise
and the introduction of more fuel-efficient planes, driven by the massive
expansion of low-cost carriers.
According
to analysis by thinktank Transport & Environment (T&E), Ryanair’s CO₂
emissions alone in 2025 reached 16.6 megatonnes (Mt) of CO₂ – around the same
amount as the total annual emissions of a small European country such as
Croatia. The airline carried just over 200 million passengers in 2025, compared
with 140 million in 2019.
The
entire European aviation sector emitted 195Mt of CO₂ in departing flights last
year, a 2% increase on levels before Covid paused international travel.
Although
the EU and the UK have tried to manage some of the environmental costs through
the emissions trading system (ETS), T&E said the system does not price in
most of the sector’s pollution, as it only includes flights entirely within
Europe.
That
means long-haul flights on legacy carriers’ aircraft, which burn more fuel, are
outside its scope. Airlines operating predominantly within Europe pay more
under the system – Ryanair pays an average of €50 (£36) a tonne of carbon,
while Lufthansa pays about €20. London-New York traffic alone generated nearly
1.4Mt of CO₂ in 2025, but is not drawn into the ETS.
T&E
wants the carbon market extended to all departing flights to raise more public
revenue and accelerate aviation’s slow decarbonisation. Such a move, it said,
could quadruple the €4.1bn raised for EU states by 2030, and fund production of
sustainable aviation fuel and measures to avoid contrails, the plumes of cloud
formed by planes in certain conditions that could exacerbate global heating.
While the
aviation industry has been lobbying to suspend or weaken ETS and other taxes
and regulatory requirements on flying during the Middle East crisis, the report
found that the carbon market costs were negligible compared with fuel
volatility. Jet fuel prices that have roughly doubled from pre-Iran war levels
add €90 a passenger on long-haul flights, compared with just €3 from following
the sustainable aviation fuels mandate.
“Ticket
prices are rising because of Europe’s reliance on fossil fuels, not because of
the climate measures intended to steer the sector away from them,” Giacomo
Miele, author of the T&E analysis, said.
“Aviation
emissions hitting a new high is a clear signal that the industry has no
intention of cleaning up its act. It is time to stop subsidising fossil fuel
dependency and start investing in the future of a sustainable aviation sector.”
A
spokesperson for Ryanair said its greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) were rising as
it was Europe’s fastest-growing airline, adding: “All of this growth takes
place at lower fares but on new fuel-efficient aircraft, so our GHG per
passenger are falling. Ryanair’s growth is also displacing air travel on
less-efficient legacy airlines whose GHG per passenger is much higher than
Ryanair’s.”
Ryanair
said the ETS emissions figures were “completely discredited” since they
excluded flights operated by airlines who were “indefensibly exempted from
their fair share of enviro taxes by Europe’s discriminatory ETS system, which
taxes only intra-EU flights while it exempts all flights including the most
polluting long-haul flights”.
Ryanair
says that when all flights are included it ranks behind Lufthansa, Air
France/KLM and British Airways owner IAG for total emissions, while having the
lowest CO₂ emissions a head of the big European airlines, of about 64g a
passenger kilometre.
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