Environmental Accounting Approach to Evaluate Air Freight Traffic in a Turkish International Airport

Abstract

Air freight transportation has major advantages such as rapid and safe transit of goods compared to other transportation modes. As well as other transportation sectors growth rate of air freight transportation is related to global supply chain. Air freight sector fundamentally includes freight forwarders, integrators, warehousing, customs, agents, airport terminal operators, and air freight carriers. Cost of air freight transportation is dependent to carrier expenses including costs of ground and flight crew, fuel, aircraft maintenance and insurance. But environmental prevention costs are usually missed out and disregarded. But environmental costs gained importance for many enterprises as well as airway companies after Kyoto and Paris Agreements. The current paper describes an approach to calculate prevention cost of air freight operations induced air pollutants. For this purpose, air freight traffic in an International Airport located in Isparta, Turkey is considered to present the approach. At the end of the study environmental cost of each air pollutant emissions, annual environmental cost of flight operations in the airport, and annual environmental cost per unit freight are calculated and compared in terms of yearly variation. The presented approach is employed to evaluate environmental costs related to air freight traffic in an International Airport for the first time.