Heathrow Airport – a Corporate Partner of the FTE Digital, Innovation & Startup Hub – has announced an increase in its pioneering carbon cutting scheme for a fourth year. In 2025, £86 million will be available to airlines through the airport’s Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) incentive scheme, targeting 3% of aviation fuel used at Heathrow to be SAF – amounting to 187,000 tonnes.
The scheme encourages airlines to switch to SAF by approximately halving the price gap between kerosene and its cleaner alternative, making SAF more commercially viable for airlines. In 2025, the scheme aims to reduce lifecycle carbon emissions from flights by over 500,000 tonnes.
The 2025 incentive aims to align with Heathrow’s target to be 1% above the UK mandate in 2030: achieving 11% SAF use at the airport. Integrating SAF into the fuel supply is a crucial step in the airport’s journey toward achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
“Sustainable Aviation Fuel is no longer a future promise – it’s a proven solution that is powering flights worldwide,” said Matt Gorman, Director of Carbon Strategy, Heathrow. “Our SAF incentive scheme, part of our Connecting People and Planet sustainability strategy, has made significant progress and we’re now exploring options to set a long-term incentive signal to 2030. We are delighted that government has moved so quickly to legislate the SAF mandate. We must now accelerate legislation for the SAF Revenue Certainty Mechanism to ensure we can build a domestic industry that will help decarbonise and drive economic growth.”
Heathrow has also published its ‘Nature Positive Plan’ which outlines its commitment to better understand, and where possible, reduce Heathrow’s impacts on nature. Key commitments include using nature-based solutions to solve Heathrow’s challenges wherever feasible, expanding nature networks around the airport to support ecological resilience, improving biodiversity management, supporting nature-based carbon removal, and being the first airport in the world to commit to adopting the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) recommendations for annually reporting on its impacts and dependencies on nature.
Alongside the Nature Positive Plan, Heathrow is updating its sustainability strategy, ‘Connecting People and Planet’ (Heathrow 2.0). The refreshed plan introduces more ambitious goals in areas where significant progress has been achieved, while adopting realistic yet stretching targets in response to evolving circumstances and data-driven insights. It highlights clear progress and increased ambitions in priority areas, including reducing noise impacts, improving air quality, and supporting the local community.
