Airmiles monitoring: How it is being done at GIUZ

New approach to air travel statistics from 2021 onwards

Emissions

Until 2020, the division secretariats manually queried airmiles/kilometres and CO2 equivalents from Atmosfair. In 2021, we automated this process, retrieving the CO2 equivalents from the GoClimate Flight Emissions API. Both services yield comparable but slightly different emission estimates. For example, Atmosfair estimates 2’235 to 3’855 kg of CO2 emissions for an economy class round trip from Zurich (ZRH) to New York (JFK), depending on the airline. For the same trip, GoClimate estimates average emissions of 2’400 kg CO2.

Flight distance

We automatically compute the Haversine distance between each departure and arrival airport of each flight. The Haversine distance from Zurich (ZRH) to Lima (LIM) with a stopover in Madrid (MAD) equals 10’778 km, slightly below the 10’855 km manually retrieved from Atmosfair.

Staff count

The GIUZ administration implemented a new method to count the Department staff, providing a harmonised baseline for evaluating per capita emissions and distance.

Automatization

So far, the secretariats have manually queried flight distances and CO2 equivalents. Now, we automatically retrieve the emissions from the GoClimate Flight Emissions API and compute flight distances in R, reducing the workload on the secretariats and making the reporting reproducible and consistent.

R script

The airmiles analysis is now available as a script in R markdown, with modular code chunks for each step (pre-processing, emission retrieval, statistical analysis, plotting), simplifying future airmiles analysis.