An analysis of the environmental reporting structures of selected European airlines

This article draws on a survey of eight Europe based airlines' environmental reports to illustrate the status and progress of environmental reporting in the airline industry in Europe. Four major categories of components in the report are differentiated, namely recognised core components, recognised important components, recognised add‐on components and recognised developing components. The study further finds that the units used in the fuel efficiency indicator are not the same in the airlines studied and therefore benchmarking is difficult. The results also indicate that the topics pertinent to employee and community involvement exceed the technical data of discharge and compliance‐based environmental performance in their environmental policy statements. In addition, some new features of environmental reporting are identified.