Environmental Sustainability Performance in Aviation: An Analysis Based on Stakeholders’ Sustainability Reports

As global sustainability efforts gain momentum, large-scale enterprises across various industries increasingly disclose their environmental impacts, goals, and improvement initiatives through sustainability reports. The aviation industry, characterized by continuous growth in parallel with the global economy, plays a complex role in sustainability, contributing both positively and negatively across its dimensions. Understanding the performance of industry stakeholders in reducing environmental impacts is therefore of critical importance and serves as the main motivation for this study. This research aims to evaluate the environmental sustainability performance of key stakeholders in the aviation sector. An exploratory case study methodology was employed, analyzing the sustainability reports of selected aviation companies in Turkey for the years 2021 and 2022. Using descriptive analysis, data disclosed under environmental sustainability categories were examined on a company basis, summarized, converted into comparative tables, and evaluated across eight key indicators. The findings reveal that İGA achieved improvements in three out of eight indicators, TAV in five, Turkish Airlines (THY) in one, while Pegasus did not show any improvement in the indicators examined. Overall, the results indicate that the environmental performance of aviation stakeholders in Türkiye is insufficient in terms of reducing their environmental impacts.