Source page: McKinsey & Company
Commentary
The flight path to net-zero flying
Aerospace | Decarbonization
July 25, 2023 – While the aviation industry has made progress toward achieving net-zero flying by 2050, the path forward will be complex. As of April, 25 airlines and 18 aerospace and defense companies have committed to setting or have set emissions goals related to the Science Based Targets initiative. Partners Axel Esqué and Robin Riedel and colleagues find that fuel efficiency, one key metric for judging progress, improved by approximately 39 percent from 2005 to 2019, yet the absolute growth of emissions is larger than efficiency gains by far.
To read the article, see “Decarbonizing aviation: Executing on net-zero goals,” June 16, 2023.
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Visual form
Two-panel bar chart.
Layout / body structure
The page is split into a left panel for airlines and a right panel for aerospace and defense companies, and each panel is read year by year from 2020 through 2023.
What is being compared
It compares the growth in Science Based Targets initiative aligned climate-goal commitments across the two aviation-related groups and pairs commitment counts with share metrics for passenger traffic or sector revenues.
Measurement system
The measures are the number of companies with goals committed or set and the associated share of passenger traffic or sector revenues, shown in separate bar clusters within each panel.
Visible structure inside the graphic
Panel headings, year labels, and repeated bar groups create a mirrored structure so the reader can compare airlines and aerospace-and-defense companies on the same footing.
Main takeaway from the visual
Both panels climb over time, showing that formal climate-goal commitments are spreading across the aviation ecosystem rather than remaining limited to one corner of the sector.
Key standout values or extremes
The most important visible extreme is temporal: the bars are highest at the 2023 end of the sequence in both panels after a lower starting point in 2020.
Controls / sequence, when applicable
This is a static chart image with no in-chart controls to operate.
Companion media, when applicable
There is no separate companion audio or video; the chart image is the full visual on this page.