SAS President and CEO to attend UN Leadership Forum on Climate Change
On September 22, SAS President and CEO Mats Jansson will participate in the UN Leadership Forum on Climate Change in New York along with other global leaders. The list of delegates includes the prime ministers of the Nordic countries and chief executives of a large number of multinational companies.
The purpose of the Forum is to bring together leaders from a variety of companies and organizations with the aim of building political momentum and mutual understanding prior to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December. As head of one of three airlines attending, SAS and Mats Jansson’s role at the Forum is to describe and stand behind the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) efforts to achieve a global solution for aviation in the forthcoming “Copenhagen Protocol.” “For SAS, participation in the Forum in New York and at the UN to describe the aviation industry’s environmental platform to global leaders is a very important undertaking,” says Mats Jansson, President and CEO of SAS. SAS was a key driving force in developing IATA’s joint environmental platform. Earlier this year, the platform was presented at the World Business Summit in Copenhagen. The unique element of the IATA’s environmental platform is that for the first time a global industry has agreed on joint environmental targets. IATA’s environmental targets can be summarized as follows: • A cap on aviation CO2 emissions from 2020 (carbon-neutral growth); • An average improvement in fuel efficiency of 1.5% per year from 2009 to 2020; and • A reduction in CO2 emissions of 50% by 2050, relative to 2005 levels. “SAS’s own environmental objective is to reduce the company’s total climate-impact emissions by at least 20 percent by 2020. Although we have set a higher target than IATA, the fact that a global industry has reached a consensus is ambitious and actually quite unique,” concludes Mats Jansson. Read more about SAS’s environmental targets at http://www.sasgroup.net/miljo SAS Group Corporate Communications