Munich Airport Publishes Sustainability Report

FMG, the Munich Airport operating company, has released its first-ever sustainability report. Entitled “Perspectives”, the 110-page report documents FMG’s concept for a sustainable business policy.

 Speaking at the official presentation of the report at Munich Airport, FMG’s CEO Dr Michael Kerkloh said, “In all three areas the decisive standard is to gear our corporate policy towards maintaining and strengthening the foundations of our business activities in the long term so that we can continue to operate successfully in the years ahead in the interests of ensuring Bavaria's future mobility as well as retaining its competitiveness as a business location.”

The airport’s goals for climate protection and the environment serve as examples to illustrate the airport’s demanding objectives for sustainable airport operations. The FMG has set a very ambitious target for its future corporate policy: It wants to achieve CO2-neutral growth in Munich Airport’s operations by 2020. This will be no mean achievement — when we consider that FMG does not want to see any increase in the approximately 160,000 tons of CO2 emissions in its sphere of influence (based on 2005 levels) despite the expected growth in traffic. Without a determined program of preventive measures, CO2 emissions would increase by somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 tons by 2020.

To prevent this, FMG has developed numerous energy-saving measures. One key area has been the field of sustainable construction. Through expanded use of renewable energy, all new buildings are expected to show a 40% reduction in CO2 emissions as compared with existing structures. The largest of such pending projects is definitely the Terminal 2 satellite, which is now in the planning stage. For this project, FMG is following the exacting standards of the German Sustainable Construction Association, which it joined in June 2009. In addition, FMG plans to optimize the existing airport buildings in line with the latest developments in insulation and energy efficiency.

FMG is also saving energy with the lighting of the ramp areas at Munich Airport: approximately one quarter of the nearly 3000 floodlights that ensure proper visibility on the aprons and park positions during the hours of darkness are now switched on only as needed. They are activated automatically by a flight timetable computer. The environmental benefit: annual savings of nearly one million kilowatt hours of electrical power and about 570 tons of carbon dioxide.

Apart from implementing its own projects, FMG also helps its airline partners to boost their energy efficiency. An innovative project in this area relates to the supply of pre-conditioned air to aircraft at park positions adjacent to the airport terminals. In the past, airlines always used APUs – auxiliary power units – for this purpose. These devices are not particularly energy-efficient, however. The FMG now intends to equip the jetways successively with compact air conditioning units linked to the airport’s supply network. In the future the aircraft docked at the park positions will use these units to draw warm or cold air, depending on the season, to maintain a comfortable interior climate. After all of the positions adjacent to the terminals are retrofitted, up to 14,000 tons of CO2 will be saved every year.

With its catalog of ecological measures, FMG is in line with global efforts to make air transportation as environmentally friendly as possible. Although the aviation sector now causes only approximately 2% of global CO2 emissions, the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the Airports Council International (ACI) and other international organizations recently passed ambitious climate objectives. They call for an average annual reduction of 1.5% in the specific fuel consumption in air transportation. This will make it possible for the sector to achieve CO2-neutral growth as of 2020. For 2050 the industry intends to reduce CO2 emissions to 50% of the levels in the 2005 baseline year.

FMG’s sustainability report is based on the mandatory guidelines of the internationally renowned Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). These guidelines are intended to make worldwide corporate reporting more transparent and comparable. Depending on the scope and intensity of reporting, GRI ranks the sustainability reports submitted to it from A to C on the basis of a wide-ranging catalog of criteria.

 “We are rather proud that we managed to achieve the top rating, an A, with our very first sustainability report. What makes this even more remarkable is that no other European airport's sustainability report has received the best possible rating,” said airport CEO, Kerkloh.

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