The replacement of 11 domestic air routes with rail alternatives could reduce the emissions generated by aviation companies that operate flights within Spain by 9.71%. This was stated in a study presented this morning by the entity Ecologistas en Acción, which refers to those peninsular flights that currently already have an alternative rail route that does not exceed 4 hours of travel time.
According to experts, eliminating these 11 air connections, which include those that link Barcelona with Madrid and the links between the Spanish capital and Santiago de Compostela and Seville, would mean reducing more than 300,000 tons of CO2, equivalent to almost 10%. of all emissions produced by domestic aviation in Spain, that is, flights carried out within Spanish territory. A change that, according to the coordinator of the Ecologistas en Acción aviation campaign, Pablo Muñoz, “is enormously necessary” to stop the climate crisis.
After the entry into force on May 23 in France of a regulation that prohibits short-distance flights that have an alternative by train with a journey of less than two and a half hours, all eyes have been on Spain. Today, Wednesday, Ecologistas en Acción presented a report at a press conference that analyzes the environmental impacts and some aspects of the viability of this measure.
Pablo Muñoz recalls that “Spain is one of the countries in the Union where domestic flights have grown the most in recent years.” Between 2013 and 2019, domestic air routes grew by 27% in Spain, which represented a 30% increase in CO2 emissions from this type of journey.
The report also compares domestic air operations in Spain with those of countries such as France or the United Kingdom, which managed to reduce them by 5% and 8% respectively until 2019. According to Muñoz, this increase represented a “huge impact in terms of emissions.” totally incompatible with the objectives we have set.”
The study proposes 11 potentially substitutable routes, among which are the routes that connect Barcelona and Madrid and the services between Madrid and Valencia, Alicante, Málaga, Pamplona, ??Santiago de Compostela, Seville, La Coruña, Granada and Logroño. The replacement of these air routes with train routes does not in any case exceed 4 hours of travel time.
The investigation states that these 11 routes produced 408.6 tons of nitrogen oxides and 2.7 tons of suspended particles during 2019, figures that they describe as “very worrying” due to the serious effects they have on the health of the population. population near airports. In a radius of 20 kilometers (a distance in which the concentration of particles is very high), only around the Madrid and Barcelona airports, 5.8 million people live.
Assuming that all the demand for these trips would be transferred to rail services, the study calculates that the net emissions savings would be between 30% and 40% of the emissions of all peninsular air traffic. Experts highlight the importance of replacing the routes between Madrid and Barcelona, ??which registered more than 15,000 operations in 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year with normal air traffic), generating more than 168,000 tons of CO2.
The Aviation coordinator of the environmental NGO assures that the replacement of peninsular air routes with railway alternatives “is technically and legally viable” and that it has been demonstrated “both by existing railway alternatives and by existing precedents in the EU.”
Furthermore, the study concludes that this measure would not negatively affect competition between airline companies, since it is a highly concentrated market structure, with 56 daily frequencies on the routes analyzed in the hands of the IAG economic group and only one daily frequency on hands of Ryanair.
From Ecologists in Action they propose that in Spain, a country that “meets all the conditions to transfer a large number of passengers to the railway”, due to its extensive high-speed network – the largest in the European Union and the second largest globally. It would be possible with the already existing railway infrastructure, and therefore without the need to add “not one more kilometer of track.”
In addition to the decrease in CO2 emissions, the Ecologistas en Acción study calculates that replacing these domestic air routes with train alternatives would mean a saving of 50 million euros annually in externalities, which are the social and economic costs generated by transportation problems. In the case of air transport, the main externalities are the pollution of areas close to airports, global atmospheric pollution, and airport congestion, which generate costs for both travelers and companies.
