What are contrails and why are they relevant to business travel? London - 22 June 2026

The Aviation Impact Accelerator is pleased to be hosting an evening event in collaboration with Transport & Environment exploring the issue of contrails – a significant non-CO2 climate impact of aviation.

Convening organisations with substantial business travel during London Climate Action Week 2026, we will hear from international experts on why contrails matter, the size of the opportunity (potentially halving aviation’s climate warming impact) and how business travellers can use their significant influence to progress contrail management as a high-impact, low-cost pathway towards a more sustainable aviation system.

Why do contrails matter?

Contrails – the cloudy lines in the sky sometimes produced by aircraft – have a significant climate warming impact, potentially almost equal to the impact of carbon emissions from aviation. However, while reducing CO2 emissions is an important focus of many aviation sustainability initiatives, most potential solutions will take some time to overcome engineering challenges and scale up operationally. Avoiding contrail formation offers a comparatively easy win with real short-term impact – in many cases, aircraft can avoid forming contrails by making small adjustments to their altitude in-flight. Only a small subset of flights generate most of the warming impact, meaning intervention can be targeted (only around 5% of flights would need to do anything to achieve about an 80% reduction in contrail-related warming).

Business travellers hold important influence over the behaviour of aviation stakeholders, presenting organisations with a large amount of business travel an opportunity to reduce the climate impact of their own travel while also driving positive change across the industry. The aim of this event is to help these organisations understand the scale of the opportunity associated with contrail management, and what they can do to realise it.

Provisional agenda:

• 18:00 - Welcome from the hosts and keynote address
• 18:10 - Presentation – what are contrails and why do they matter?
• 18:30 - Panel discussion – From awareness to action: business travel as a positive influence for contrail management
• 19:05 - Q&A with the panellists and contrail experts
• 19:30 - Networking and drinks

We look forward to hosting you on Monday 22nd June in London. Please follow the link below to register:

Register here

Note – we hope to accommodate all those who register, but due to capacity constraints at the venue final confirmations of attendance will be circulated 1 week before the event

Please contact Edmund Dickens (Edmund.dickens@cisl.cam.ac.uk) with any questions