Dear ATAG members,
In this first ATAG Briefing since April 2024, I am providing you with an overview of our main activities during the latter part of last year. I am also outlining our key priorities for 2025.
ATAG has continued to foster support for investment in sustainable aviation fuel as part of its focus on ensuring the aviation industry, energy sector and finance community are ready for the scale-up of SAF as part of the aviation decarbonisation challenge.
We organised a series of briefings on this subject for the finance sector, in partnership with BloombergNEF, and are continuing this partnership in 2025. I also undertook speaking commitments at numerous events, including: Sustainable Aviation Fuels North America, Aviation Carbon, the Bahrain International Air Show, Deutsche Bank’s 14th Annual Aircraft Finance & Leasing Conference and their Sustainable Aviation Investor Event, the ISTAT Sustainability Symposium, the Sustainable Aviation Futures Congress, the Sustainable Skies World Summit, ISHKA’s 2024 ESG-SAF conference, the CANSO ATM Summit and AGM, the ECAC Environment Forum, the IATA World Sustainability Symposium, the ICAO Symposium on non-CO₂ Aviation Emissions, the ICAO LTAG Stocktaking Event on Aviation CO₂ Emissions Reductions, the Foreign Policy Energy Forum at UNGA79 and the ICAO event celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Chicago Convention.
Another priority in 2024 was supporting ICAO’s work to establish the necessary building blocks for policies at a global level to help support SAF scale-up, particularly in developing economies around the world. Part of that process is the development of the ICAO Finvest hub, to help bring together the various parties which will be vital to the SAF scale-up challenge. This work is ongoing in 2025.
Work has progressed on non-CO₂ effects: we developed a joint industry working paper for the ICAO Air Navigation Conference, established an ATAG working group and published a briefing paper on addressing contrails.
With regards to membership, we welcomed a number of ATAG members to Geneva for the 2024 General Assembly and to London in January 2025 for the ATAG 2025 Strategy Meeting (for Principal Partner and Strategic Associate members). Seven new members joined ATAG in 2024: Aercap, European Cargo Alliance, Heathrow, SAF One, SkyNRG, Neste and World Energy.
ATAG participated in COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, at which good outreach opportunities were provided through 45 aviation-related side events across the two weeks.
In addition, we continued to run our regular Path to Net Zero briefings, to update the industry on key topics and activities.
ATAG also recruited a new Communications and Policy Advisor (Consultant), who brings some much needed additional communications resources to the association at a time when “green claims” issues are growing in momentum. We hosted a very interesting session with a lawyer on this subject – see the section on Path to Net Zero briefings.
2024 concluded with the launch of Aviation: Benefits Beyond Borders, which provides an in-depth analysis of the economic and social contributions of the global aviation sector and how it connects our globalised world. We used the report to kick off a wider communications campaign on the positive impact aviation generates around the world and revamped our social media channels.
Please read on for more information. Short summaries are provided below but please do click on the individual sections to consult the full articles.
Yours sincerely
