Air New Zealand Further Reduces Its Climate Commitment

New Zealand’s national carrier, which abandoned its 2030 emissions target last year, has now called its current plans ‘guidance’ on its climate efforts.

A stock photo of an airplane. Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images

Air New Zealand has decided against setting climate goals and instead will issue periodic guidance on how its climate efforts are tracking.

It comes a year after the airline scrapped its 2030 climate targets, saying they were “unaffordable and unattainable,” and promised to work on a new target that better reflects industry challenges.

Chief Sustainability and Corporate Affairs Officer Kiri Hannifin announced that going forward, it will only be issuing “guidance” on its performance in cutting emissions.

She said these guidelines will be updated regularly to reflect the airline’s expectations, market conditions, and policy developments.

“Air New Zealand remains committed to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and we are taking practical steps today towards achieving that ambition,” she said in a statement.

“Having a comprehensive and annually updated outlook of our emissions trajectory to 2030, and a clear understanding of how we can get there, is a critical stepping stone.”

Hannifin said the change would provide the public with greater transparency on the airline’s progress to decarbonise.

“We had to pull out of our science-based target last year because we couldn’t achieve it, and when you can’t achieve something, you have to be honest about that,” she told RNZ.

“But our view is you can’t be an airline and cause the harm that you do without having something in the market that talks about how you’re going to decarbonise, and so that’s why we replaced it. But we’ve replaced it with something that is ambitious, it is achievable but it is really going to stretch us.”

The first such guidance statement said that as of May 1, 2025, Air New Zealand expects to reduce its “well-to-wake” net greenhouse gas emissions from jet fuel by 20 to 25 percent by 2030, compared against a 2019 baseline.

Well-to-wake emissions include jet fuel production, distribution, and combustion in flight, which the airline said account for 92 percent of its annual climate impact of 4.3 million tonnes of greenhouse gases.

New Zealand’s total greenhouse gas emissions are around 76 million tonnes a year, but most of the carbon emitted by Air NZ doesn’t count toward that figure because it occurs overseas.

Former Climate Targets

In 2022, the airline adopted a plan to cut its emissions by almost 29 percent by 2030, well in excess of the 5 percent goal adopted by the global aviation industry.

But its plan relied heavily on rapidly increasing its use of sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), and airlines have struggled to purchase enough of it.

Two years later, in July 2024, Air NZ announced it was dropping its 2030 carbon intensity reduction target and withdrawing from the Science-Based Targets initiative, saying new aircraft and alternative jet fuels were hard and expensive to obtain.

At the time, Chief Executive Greg Foran said work had begun to consider a new target that would better reflect industry challenges, and Board Chair Therese Walsh said the airline remained committed to reaching its 2050 net zero goal.

“Our work to transition away from fossil fuels continues, as does our advocacy for the global and domestic regulatory and policy settings that will help facilitate Air New Zealand, and the wider aviation system in New Zealand, to do its part to mitigate climate change risks,” Walsh said in a statement.