January/February 2024 - 28

CONSULTANT CORNER
AUTHOR Joe Petrie
Revolutionizing
Airport Sustainability:
C&S and Steer Launch
a Pioneering Net-Zero
Planning Tool for North
American Airports
Corey Johnson and Ian Sample discuss the challenges of
achieving net-zero emissions and the strategic solutions
provided by this cutting-edge technology.
AS AIRPORTS across North America look to enhance the
sustainability of their operations, there are innumerable
areas where they can make an impact.
All the options coupled with all of the
unknown issues can make sustainability
initiatives a daunting task when integrating
them into master planning. C&S
Companies and Steer recently launched a
digital tool for airports to calculate these
impacts to create a planning roadmap
so leaders know what to consider when
addressing these plans.
Corey Johnson, Director, Aviation
Sustainability for C&S Companies, and
Ian Sample, Associate for Steer, discussed
the tool with Airport Business and some of
the challenges airports are tackling with
strong data at their fingertips.
Airport Business: Tell me about the
partnership between C&S and Steer to
provide a unique advantage in achieving
the goal of net carbon for airports.
Ian Sample: Steer and C&S are two
companies that have worked pretty
closely together in the aviation space,
particularly over the last several years.
offer to help airports cut across the complexity
when it comes to airport net-zero
challenges.
AB: Net-zero is a big challenge overall
when we're talking about something an
airport's trying to achieve. What's the
overall strategy for securing buy-in at
all levels in an airport organization to
achieve this?
IS: It starts with developing an overall
mission and vision for what the organization
is trying to achieve. That's critical
with any type kind of long-term strategic
planning and thinking to coalesce
a clear vision that has the buy-in from
your senior leadership team and is co-developed
through your senior leadership
team and then flowing that vision down
throughout the organization in the form
of a series of key objectives and goals, but
making sure they all come down from
that overarching mission and vision that
the organization is trying to get to so
that there's always a sense of connectivity
up to that kind of critical end state.
Net-zero planning is a great example of
an area where it's critical to have that
high-level mission and vision established
and then flow through how you're going
to get there.
Corey Johnson,
Director, Aviation
Sustainability, C&S
Companies
C&S COMPANIES
Ian Sample,
Associate, Steer
STEER
AB: Steer and C&S Companies have
partnered on the new airport decarbonization
calculator. Can you explain a little
bit how this works?
Corey Johnson: We wanted to provide
C&S brings industry-leading technical
expertise in emissions evaluation and
monitoring. Some of their focus on
funding and grant administration types
opportunities as well as their expertise in
facility design and planning. And then
Steer comes from more of an organizational
strategy, operational review, and
business planning background. We felt
that was a great combination to pair the
expertise of those two firms into a joint
28 \ AIRPORT BUSINESS / JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2024
something useful to the industry. We
wanted to provide a tool that could spark
a lot of the internal airport conversations
that we felt were important between
leadership and their technical staff. This
decarbonization calculator helps answer
that question that a lot of airports are
facing, and that question is " what will
it take for us to get to net-zero? " For
airports that haven't set their emissions
baseline or sought to understand what
their business-as-usual emissions trajectory
looks like, the calculator gives
them some simple inputs where they can
initialize the model.
January/February 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of January/February 2024
