How to use data-led intelligence to curb transport emissions

Technology touches everything we do. For example, lowering carbon emissions is imperative for transport assets to continue to operate and grow, and we have worked closely with the management teams of our transport assets for many years to be at the forefront of this global challenge, not least by using data science and digital tools.

For transport assets, Scope 3 emissions – the indirect emissions generated by the activity of an asset – represent the largest proportion of total emissions. Despite this, they are the most difficult to record and measure, as they require a large amount of data from many different stakeholders.

For an airport, Scope 3 includes a wide range of activity, notably landing and take-off cycles, taxi time of an aircraft on the ground, aircraft power unit usage, ground service equipment activity and also passengers’ transportation to and from the airport. Today, most airports do not have access to all the data behind these different activities.

Data-driven decisions

AirCarbon, a bespoke carbon emission measurement tool built in-house by Ardian Infrastructure, aims to obtain an automatic, accurate and data-driven view of an airport’s emissions. Already deployed throughout the 2i Aeroporti platform in Italy (which includes airports in Milan, Turin and Naples), it measures the main sources of carbon for the industry at both local (airport) and global (aggregated) levels.

The tool also drives industry-standardised benchmarks and best practices through the sharing of data. In addition, AirCarbon provides forecasts based on different scenarios and can thus help airports in building roadmaps for carbon reduction with more visibility on their expected impact.

Technological solutions such as AirCarbon are therefore critical to increasing efficiency and accuracy in carbon emission measurement. The technology also aims to increase transparency and data sharing across the industry to better monitor and enhance the efforts of the whole industry in curbing carbon emissions, while continuing to answer the needs of its users.

The same challenges and imperatives apply to road traffic. This is why, following the success of AirCarbon, we started to develop CarCarbon, another tool to measure Scope 3 emissions coming from road assets – primarily the traffic on motorways. We have already deployed the tool on Ascendi, a toll road operator in Portugal, which is fully owned by Ardian Infrastructure.

In much the same way as AirCarbon, CarCarbon measures and monitors emissions coming from the traffic on Ascendi’s network from a very granular level of a particular stretch of road, as well as at the whole network level. It aims to measure the forecasted impact of carbon reduction initiatives.

In order to set science-based pathways to achieve a reduction of Scope 3 emissions, it is now imperative for tools such as these to become industry standard, providing a harmonised methodology and a consolidated view of carbon trajectories.