Climate Impact
The Climate Impact tool evaluates the full environmental footprint of aircraft trajectories, including both CO₂ and non-CO₂ effects. It enables users to explore and compare climate mitigation strategies by adjusting key parameters related to operational cost, environmental performance, and air traffic complexity. Users can define spatiotemporal inputs (date, time, flight level) and select one of three analysis modes:
Business as Usual (BAU): Optimized flights for operational efficiency, minimizing fuel consumption and flight time.
Micro Scale: Focused on identifying the “greenest” trajectories at the individual level, prioritizing climate impact reduction regardless of network constraints.
Macro Scale: Optimized at network level, balancing environmental improvements with safe and manageable traffic flows by accounting for dynamic flight interactions.
The tool provides four core visualization layers: the Contrail map, which highlights regions with high warming potential from contrail formation, the Net Average Temperature Response (ATR) Map, which identifies areas contributing significantly to net warming potential, the Complexity Map displaying air traffic density and congestion levels, indicating potential safety and operational constraints, and the Cost vs. Emissions Comparison Plots, which show the increase or decrease of the selected environmental KPI relative to the baseline scenario, enabling assessment of the financial implications of alternative environmental strategies.
The tool has been developed by UC3M.
Watch the short video below to explore the tool in action.
How can this tool create value for its key users?
This question shaped the business impact analysis conducted by Future Needs.
Based on stakeholder evidence, policymakers represent the primary target users, while airlines and network managers are expected to become key customers in the future. Within the current regulatory landscape, policymakers can benefit from the tool by gaining access to evidence-based insights to support the design of coherent policies and incentive schemes that promote sustainable aviation practices. For airlines, the tool offers operational value by supporting trajectory optimization that balances environmental performance with cost efficiency, a critical consideration in an industry characterized by tight profit margins and high sensitivity to fuel costs. Network managers, particularly within a service-oriented or business-driven operating model, can use the tool to evaluate both operational feasibility and environmental performance at network level. By integrating air traffic complexity considerations with climate impact assessment, it supports more sustainable and system-aware planning. Fully realizing this potential, however, requires a gradual evolution of key performance indicators, shifting from an exclusive focus on operational efficiency and capacity toward the systematic integration of environmental sustainability metrics.