Developing a Comprehensive Framework for Assessing Airports’ Environmental Sustainability

Abstract

The background of this research is environmental sustainability assessments in the aviation ecosystem, particularly concerning airports, which are getting significant attention from industry representatives, regulators, and researchers. A standardized and comprehensive approach is essential to uniformly address the global impact of these assessments across the industry. The main objective of this study is to propose a framework that encompasses the requirements of aviation regulators, as well as industry and academic metrics, aiming for a standardized approach to environmental sustainability assessments at airports. The methodology employs the Sum of Rankings Method to rank each airport across various environmental indicators. This approach was applied to five globally distributed airports, offering a diverse testing ground for assessing the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed metrics and validating the ranking framework. The results show that applying the framework across varied airport environments demonstrated its ranking viability and effectiveness, indicating that it can be successfully applied to different airport realities. The conclusion shows that the developed framework can be successfully applied, suggesting that it is a valid method for adoption in environmental airport sustainability rankings.