Promises to cut emissions and use more fuel-efficient planes fail to stop rise, with Ryanair’s carbon footprint 50% up on 2019

Gwyn Topham Transport correspondent
Fri 8 May 2026 06.30 EDT

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Total aviation emissions continue to increase despite industry pledges to decarbonise and the introduction of more fuel-efficient planes, driven by the massive expansion of low-cost carriers.

According to analysis by thinktank Transport & Environment (T&E), Ryanair’s CO₂ emissions alone in 2025 reached 16.6 megatonnes (Mt) of CO₂ – around the same amount as the total annual emissions of a small European country such as Croatia. The airline carried just over 200 million passengers in 2025, compared with 140 million in 2019.

The entire European aviation sector emitted 195Mt of CO₂ in departing flights last year, a 2% increase on levels before Covid paused international travel.

Although the EU and the UK have tried to manage some of the environmental costs through the emissions trading system (ETS), T&E said the system does not price in most of the sector’s pollution, as it only includes flights entirely within Europe.

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Aviation is responsible for 3.5 percent of climate change, study finds

SEPTEMBER 3, 2020

New research that provides the most comprehensive calculations of aviation’s impact on the climate finds that global air travel and transport is responsible for 3.5 percent of all drivers of climate change from human activities.

The study, published in the journal Atmospheric Environment, evaluated all of the aviation industry’s contributing factors to climate change, including emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and nitrogen oxide (NOx), and the effect of contrails and contrail cirrus – short-lived clouds created in jet engine exhaust plumes at aircraft cruise altitudes that reflect sunlight during the day and trap heat trying to escape at night.

The findings show that two-thirds of the impact from aviation is attributed to contrails, NOx, water vapor, sulfate aerosol gases, soot, and other aerosols. The remainder is due to the cumulative heat-trapping effects of long-lived CO₂ emissions – 32.6 billion tonnes between 1940 and 2018, or roughly the total global CO₂ emissions for the year 2010.

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Lee said that estimating aviation’s non-CO₂ effects on atmospheric chemistry and clouds was a complex challenge. “We had to account for contributions caused by a range of atmospheric physical processes, including how air moves, chemical transformations, microphysics, radiation, and transport.”

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