Airline emissions in Europe top pre-Covid levels despite pledge to decarbonise

Emissions from flying in Europe have now passed pre-pandemic levels, with Ryanair’s carbon footprint 50% higher than in 2019, research has shown.

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.

That means long-haul flights on legacy carriers’ aircraft, which burn more fuel, are outside its scope. Airlines operating predominantly within Europe pay more under the system – Ryanair pays an average of €50 (£36) a tonne of carbon, while Lufthansa pays about €20. London-New York traffic alone generated nearly 1.4Mt of CO₂ in 2025, but is not drawn into the ETS.

T&E wants the carbon market extended to all departing flights to raise more public revenue and accelerate aviation’s slow decarbonisation. Such a move, it said, could quadruple the €4.1bn raised for EU states by 2030, and fund production of sustainable aviation fuel and measures to avoid contrails, the plumes of cloud formed by planes in certain conditions that could exacerbate global heating.

While the aviation industry has been lobbying to suspend or weaken ETS and other taxes and regulatory requirements on flying during the Middle East crisis, the report found that the carbon market costs were negligible compared with fuel volatility. Jet fuel prices that have roughly doubled from pre-Iran war levels add €90 a passenger on long-haul flights, compared with just €3 from following the sustainable aviation fuels mandate.

“Ticket prices are rising because of Europe’s reliance on fossil fuels, not because of the climate measures intended to steer the sector away from,” Giacomo Miele, author of the T&E analysis, said.

“Aviation emissions hitting new emissions high is a clear signal that the industry has no intention of cleaning up its act. It is time to stop subsidising fossil fuel dependency and start investing in the future of a sustainable aviation sector.”

A spokesperson for Ryanair said its greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) were rising as it was Europe’s fastest-growing airline, adding: “All of this growth takes place at lower fares but on new fuel-efficient aircraft, so our GHG per passenger are falling. Ryanair’s growth is also displacing air travel on less-efficient legacy airlines whose GHG per pax is much higher than Ryanair’s.”

Ryanair said the ETS emissions figures were “completely discredited” since they excluded flights operated by airlines who were “indefensibly exempted from their fair share of enviro taxes by Europe’s discriminatory ETS system, which taxes only intra-EU flights while it exempts all flights including the most polluting long-haul flights”.

Including all flights, according to Ryanair, it ranks behind Lufthansa, Air France/KLM and British Airways owner IAG for total emissions, while having the lowest CO₂ emissions a head of the big European airlines, of about 64g a passenger kilometre.