An inside look at the airline’s emissions journey, the practices behind its progress, and the road to its 2030 target.
Air Europa has built a consistent record on emissions reduction over the past decade. The airline has reduced its emissions by 23.58 percent against a 2015 baseline, and won SkyTeam’s annual sustainability challenge in both 2023 for lowest CO2 emissions Short Haul and 2025 for most efficient solution in flight operations. The progress reflects a measured, long-term approach rather than a single headline initiative.
To understand the practices behind those results, we looked at how the airline thinks about measurement, operations and the path to its 2030 target. What follows is a summary of the work, drawing on insights from the airline’s sustainability team.
The quotes that follow are from Rosa Nordfeldt, Sustainability Director at Air Europa.
Starting with Measurement
Air Europa’s sustainability work began not with ambition but with measurement. Before improvement targets could be set with confidence, the airline invested in the data infrastructure needed to understand its own emissions clearly and consistently. Once that foundation was in place, the targets followed, and the operational practices to deliver against them came after that.
“Before you can improve operational performance, you need confidence in the data and a shared understanding of what ‘good’ looks like. Once measurement matured, ambition followed naturally, and that ambition then translated into operational practices.”
It is a sequence that gives the airline confidence in the targets it sets, because those targets are anchored in what the data actually supports. It also makes each percentage point of improvement easier to find, because the measurement infrastructure is already in place to identify it. (....)