Measure, monitor, reduce: How can ANSPs help the environment?

While the biggest sustainability issues facing aviation are related to aircraft fuel burn, emissions and noise, there are many good reasons for Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs), like us, to reduce the impact of their own operations too.

To help do this NATS has worked with the Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation (CANSO) to develop a best practice guide to carbon footprinting. This will be used by fellow ANSPs to encourage them to consider how they can benefit from measuring their carbon emissions too.

The guide provides a way of measuring, monitoring and reducing emissions – focusing mainly on the impact of powering buildings. This is integral to responsible business practice and a good first step to sound environmental management.

Since 2008 when NATS started measuring and targeting energy efficiency, energy consumption has reduced by over 30% in absolute terms, saving enough energy to power 2,500 family homes each year and significantly reducing costs!

These extraordinary reductions are the result of a broad range of NATS initiatives – including the installation of more efficient lighting, improving the way we heat and cool our buildings and the introduction of renewable power generation solutions.

As well as this, our annual ‘Cyclescheme’ and the launch of a salary sacrifice option for staff to purchase lower emission cars has also helped reduce our environmental impact as a business.

We have taken on a broader piece of work looking to implement an Environmental Management System across all our sites to understand how they protect the environment too. Glasgow and Manchester are the two first air traffic towers in the UK to have been certified so far.

You can read the full CANSO guide online here.