Britain is responsible for the largest number of international private jet flights to top holiday destinations in Europe, a new report commissioned by Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe found.
Last year, a whopping 12,702 private jets – an average of more than one every hour – took off from the UK bound for getaway resorts across the continent. The three most popular airports were Nice-Côte d’Azur, Geneva and Palma, followed by Malaga, Faro and Ibiza.
The analysis, conducted by T3 Transportation Think Tank for Greenpeace, looked at over 100,000 private jet flights to 45 European airports located close to popular resorts. The largest share of flights to these locations originated from the UK, almost 11% of the total.
It also found a marked increase in private aircraft traffic during the summer season, strongly indicating that private jets were used more frequently for vacation purposes during these times. Summer destinations saw three and half times more arrivals in July than in January.
The thousands of private jet flights originating from the UK caused around 67,000 tons of CO2 – without counting the return journeys – which is equivalent to the emissions from around 45,000 fossil fuel-powered cars. The average private jet flight to one of these destinations emits almost as much carbon as the annual energy related emissions of an average European citizen (4.46 and 5.37 tonnes of CO2 respectively).
The findings will reignite public concerns at the outsized rate at which a minority of wealthy individuals are fuelling the climate crisis. In the UK, the richest 0.1% emit 22 times more from transport than low earners, and 12 times more than the average person, according to a recent IPPR report.
Campaigners are calling on the UK government to ban private jets and introduce a wealth tax on the super rich that would fund, among other things, measures to lower train fares and energy bills for ordinary people.
Commenting on the findings, Greenpeace UK’s climate campaigner, Georgia Whittaker, said:
“While the super-rich take their private jets to their yachts and mansions on the French Riviera, people on the ground keep feeling the impacts of deadly floods and heatwaves fuelled disproportionately by the wealthy. This absurd level of private luxury for the few is helping to create a public disaster for the many – we can’t go on like this.
“To tackle both growing inequalities and the climate crisis, the UK government should ban polluting private jets and impose a wealth tax on the super rich. The extra revenue from that could fund measures that would both cut planet heating emissions and make transport and energy bills cheaper for ordinary people.”
For UK flights, the three most popular destination countries were Spain, France and Switzerland, and the three most popular routes analysed Farnborough–Nice/Côte d’Azur (759 flights), Luton–Nice/Côte d’Azur (500 flights) and Farnborough–Geneva (484 flights). The top three UK airports for private jet flights to holiday destinations are Farnborough, Luton and Biggin Hill.
