New Civil Engineer
Gavin Pearson
26 September 2025
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has set out a roadmap to expand and sharpen the UK’s official reporting on aviation’s environmental impact. This signals a move towards more frequent, granular and interactive data on emissions, noise and air quality.
The regulator said its UK Aviation Environmental Review (AER) — a statutory requirement introduced after Britain left the EU — will move from the first national-level report published in December 2023 to a more comprehensive annual reporting cycle for core data from 2025, with recommendations on measures to improve environmental performance revised every three years from 2026.
A central plank of the CAA’s plan is a new CAA Emissions Database, currently under development, which the authority says will allow emissions reporting “closer to real‑time” than existing government inventories that have a two‑year lag. The database is intended to support multiple metrics that stakeholders asked for during a 2024 consultation, such as emissions per passenger kilometer and emissions by cargo density.
Future updates are expected to break down emissions by flights departing, arriving and overflying the UK, report emissions by distance flown (to distinguish short‑ and long‑haul impacts), and publish air quality and noise data on an airport‑by‑airport basis.
