IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsusta/v11y2019i7p2102-d221065.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Flying Green from a Carbon Neutral Airport: The Case of Brussels

Author

Listed:
  • Kobe Boussauw

    (Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research—Department of Geography, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium)

  • Thomas Vanoutrive

    (Urban Studies Institute and Research Group for Urban Development, University of Antwerp, B-2000 Antwerp, Belgium)

Abstract

The aviation sector is one of the fastest growing emitters of greenhouse gases worldwide. In addition, airports have important local environmental impacts, mainly in the form of noise pollution and deterioration in air quality. Although noise nuisance in the vicinity of airports is recognized as an important problem of the urban environment which is often addressed by regulation, other environmental problems associated with aviation are less widely acknowledged. In the climate debate, the importance of which is rising, aviation has remained under the radar for decades. In the present paper, we use the case of Brussels Airport (Belgium) to demonstrate that the local perception of air travel-related environmental problems may be heavily influenced by the communication strategy of the airport company in question. Basing our analysis on publicly available data, communication initiatives, media reports, and policy documents, we find that (1) the noise impact of aviation is recognized and mainly described in an institutionalized format, (2) the impact of aviation on local air quality is ignored, and (3) the communication on climate impact shows little correspondence or concern with the actual effects. These findings are relevant for other airports and sectors, since the type of environmental communication produced by airport companies can also be observed elsewhere.

Suggested Citation

  • Kobe Boussauw & Thomas Vanoutrive, 2019. "Flying Green from a Carbon Neutral Airport: The Case of Brussels," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(7), pages 1-19, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:7:p:2102-:d:221065
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/7/2102/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/7/2102/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Laura Deruytter & Ben Derudder, 2019. "Keeping financialisation under the radar: Brussels Airport, Macquarie Bank and the Belgian politics of privatised infrastructure," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 56(7), pages 1347-1367, May.
    2. Wood, F.R. & Bows, A. & Anderson, K., 2010. "Apportioning aviation CO2 emissions to regional administrations for monitoring and target setting," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 17(4), pages 206-215, August.
    3. Gray, Rob, 2013. "Back to basics: What do we mean by environmental (and social) accounting and what is it for?—A reaction to Thornton," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 24(6), pages 459-468.
    4. Deegan, Craig, 2017. "Twenty five years of social and environmental accounting research within Critical Perspectives of Accounting: Hits, misses and ways forward," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 65-87.
    5. Frédéric Dobruszkes, 2008. "Éléments pour une géographie sociale de la contestation des nuisances aériennes à Bruxelles," ULB Institutional Repository 2013/95847, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    6. Stijn Oosterlynck & Erik Swyngedouw, 2010. "Noise Reduction: The Postpolitical Quandary of Night Flights at Brussels Airport," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 42(7), pages 1577-1594, July.
    7. Caset, Freke & Boussauw, Kobe & Storme, Tom, 2018. "Meet & fly: Sustainable transport academics and the elephant in the room," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 64-67.
    8. Wolfram Schlenker & W. Reed Walker, 2016. "Airports, Air Pollution, and Contemporaneous Health," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 83(2), pages 768-809.
    9. Abdelghany, Khaled & Abdelghany, Ahmed & Raina, Sidhartha, 2005. "A model for the airlines’ fuel management strategies," Journal of Air Transport Management, Elsevier, vol. 11(4), pages 199-206.
    10. Boussauw, Kobe & Vanoutrive, Thomas, 2017. "Transport policy in Belgium: Translating sustainability discourses into unsustainable outcomes," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 11-19.
    11. Beck, A. Cornelia & Campbell, David & Shrives, Philip J., 2010. "Content analysis in environmental reporting research: Enrichment and rehearsal of the method in a British–German context," The British Accounting Review, Elsevier, vol. 42(3), pages 207-222.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Abdellah Menou & Risto Lahdelma & Pekka Salminen, 2022. "Multicriteria Decision Aiding for Planning Renewable Power Production at Moroccan Airports," Energies, MDPI, vol. 15(14), pages 1-20, July.
    2. Kobe Boussauw & Jean-Michel Decroly, 2021. "Territorializing International Travel Emissions: Geography and Magnitude of the Hidden Climate Footprint of Brussels," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(2), pages 285-298.
    3. Alona Pukhova & Ana Tsui Moreno & Carlos Llorca & Wei-Chieh Huang & Rolf Moeckel, 2021. "Agent-Based Simulation of Long-Distance Travel: Strategies to Reduce CO2 Emissions from Passenger Aviation," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(2), pages 271-284.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bouten, Lies & Everaert, Patricia, 2015. "Social and environmental reporting in Belgium: ‘Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés’," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 24-43.
    2. Jane Andrew & Max Baker, 2020. "Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting: The Last 40 Years and a Path to Sharing Future Insights," Abacus, Accounting Foundation, University of Sydney, vol. 56(1), pages 35-65, March.
    3. Derudder, Ben & Liu, Xingjian & Hong, Song & Ruan, Shuhe & Wang, Yifei & Witlox, Frank, 2019. "The shifting position of the Journal of Transport Geography in ‘transport geography research’: A bibliometric analysis," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    4. Hausman, Catherine & Stolper, Samuel, 2021. "Inequality, information failures, and air pollution," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 110(C).
    5. Michael Howes & Liana Wortley & Ruth Potts & Aysin Dedekorkut-Howes & Silvia Serrao-Neumann & Julie Davidson & Timothy Smith & Patrick Nunn, 2017. "Environmental Sustainability: A Case of Policy Implementation Failure?," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(2), pages 1-17, January.
    6. Carozzi, Felipe & Roth, Sefi, 2023. "Dirty density: Air quality and the density of American cities," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 118(C).
    7. Ziebarth, N. R. & Schmitt, M. & Karlsson, M., 2013. "The short-term population health effects of weather and pollution: implications of climate change," Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers 13/34, HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York.
    8. Nicolai V. Kuminoff, 2018. "Can Understanding Spatial Equilibria Enhance Benefit Transfers for Environmental Policy Evaluation?," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 69(3), pages 591-608, March.
    9. Ross Levine & Chen Lin & Zigan Wang, 2018. "Pollution and Human Capital Migration: Evidence from Corporate Executives," NBER Working Papers 24389, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Salina P. Siddique & Nick Sciulli, 2018. "Sustainable development of small companies: Investors' perspectives," Business Strategy and the Environment, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(8), pages 1258-1271, December.
    11. Baumeister, Stefan & Leung, Abraham & Ryley, Tim, 2020. "The emission reduction potentials of First Generation Electric Aircraft (FGEA) in Finland," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    12. Ji, Chen & Chen, Shuai & Jin, Songqing, 2018. "Impact Evaluation of “Regulation on water pollution from livestock and poultry production” -- the case of livestock sector in China," 2018 Annual Meeting, August 5-7, Washington, D.C. 273863, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    13. Gao, Lei & Calderon, Thomas G. & Tang, Fengchun, 2020. "Public companies' cybersecurity risk disclosures," International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, Elsevier, vol. 38(C).
    14. Ordoñez, Pablo J., 2020. "Power Plants, Air Pollution, and Health in Colombia," 2020 Annual Meeting, July 26-28, Kansas City, Missouri 304284, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    15. Stefan Bauernschuster & Timo Hener & Helmut Rainer, 2017. "When Labor Disputes Bring Cities to a Standstill: The Impact of Public Transit Strikes on Traffic, Accidents, Air Pollution, and Health," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 9(1), pages 1-37, February.
    16. Deegan, Craig, 2013. "The accountant will have a central role in saving the planet … really? A reflection on ‘green accounting and green eyeshades twenty years later’," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 24(6), pages 448-458.
    17. Kong, Dongmin & Liang, Junwei & Liu, Chenhao, 2022. "Invisible enemy: The health impact of ozone," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 72(C).
    18. Pamela Kent & Robyn McCormack & Tamara Zunker, 2021. "Employee disclosures in the grocery industry before the COVID‐19 pandemic," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 61(3), pages 4833-4858, September.
    19. Tsai, Wen-Hsien & Hsu, Jui-Ling, 2008. "Corporate social responsibility programs choice and costs assessment in the airline industry—A hybrid model," Journal of Air Transport Management, Elsevier, vol. 14(4), pages 188-196.
    20. Amer Shakkour & Hamza Alaodat & Emad Alqisi & Ali Alghazawi, 2018. "The Role of Environmental Accounting in Sustainable Development. Empirical Study," Journal of Applied Finance & Banking, SCIENPRESS Ltd, vol. 8(1), pages 1-5.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:7:p:2102-:d:221065. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.