Transport & Environment has warned that planned expansion at 20 of Europe’s largest airports would push them beyond a Paris-aligned carbon budget, even after allowing for more efficient aircraft and wider use of sustainable aviation fuel. The study, commissioned by Opportunity Green, covers major airports including Dublin, Lisbon, Porto, Brussels, Charleroi, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna and Frankfurt, and concludes that current expansion plans are incompatible with national climate targets across ten European countries.
The analysis tests announced runway, terminal and traffic growth plans against a fair-share 1.7C carbon budget based on IPCC-style carbon accounting. It finds that every airport examined would exceed its allocated budget by two to three times by 2050, with the sector’s remaining 1.5C-compatible budget effectively exhausted this year under current growth assumptions.
The report estimates that planned expansions would add about 225 million tonnes of CO2 above today’s emissions. Dublin, Lisbon and Porto emerge among the worst overshoots, while Belgian coverage highlights Brussels Airport and Charleroi as likely to exhaust their budgets by around 2035. The findings directly challenge airport master plans and policy support for capacity growth, with T&E arguing that demand expansion, rather than technology, is the central climate constraint.