By its independent and innovative structure, ENVISA has provided environmental consultancy (airports, Engineering companies, airlines, CAA's) and supported major international organisations to help deliver independent scientific reports and innovative solutions.
One of ENVISA’s main missions is to bridge environmental performance and cost-effectiveness in the air transport industry. We have diversified services, including support to airports on noise, air quality, emission, ACA (Airport Carbon Accreditation) and climate change adaptation, but also research and innovative support including future environmental regulations, modelling scenarios with forecasting (including ATM, capacity, safety aspects). Envisa also spends 30% of its internal budget to R&D including a range of tools designed to facilitate calculations for air quality, global emissions, noise, third-party risk, LCA (Life cycle assessment) and many more. Combined with our in-house consulting capabilities, this provides best practice innovative solutions to our client’s environmental challenges (new construction, traffic growth, trade-offs, community management, future forecasting of environmental capacity, adaptation to climate change etc..).
ENVISA is an international environmental research and Consultancy Company specializing in finding innovative solutions to reduce the environmental footprint of aviation industry. ENVISA provides airports industry with a unique offer of integrated services for environmental management.
Steadily increasing demand for air transport means that airports are faced with capacity constraints. Airports are highly concerned with understanding how to address the challenges of sustainable growth. ENVISA provide the world’s leading aviation stakeholders with cutting edge analytical tools for traffic and demand forecasting, noise impacts, local air quality studies, global emissions and cradle-to-grave carbon foot printing.
Carbon management is not only part of environment strategy but also a means of increasing the efficiency of airport operations and energy use. As one of Europe’s most innovative aviation environmental research companies, ENVISA believes responsible environmental stewardship is not only a fundamental part of doing business; it is at the core of who we are as a company.
ENVISA have been conceiving, designing, developing, validating and consulting with environmental models since 2003 and are a driving force behind some of the world's most trusted data in aviation environmental policy.
Airports :
• Verifiable carbon footprint (for use under mandatory / voluntary schemes) and elaboration of carbon action plans.
• Local Air Quality studies: we have developed on behalf of EUROCONTROL - the ALAQS tool - which is used to support both European and International assessments of airports contribution to local air quality,
• Energy/utilities management efficiency in buildings, equipment and systems - with a focus on housekeeping and existing systems utilisation,
• Aircraft ground operations operational/fuel efficiency (e.g. taxi times, queuing and APU use optimisation),
• Utilities income/cost recovery from third parties on-site,
• Solid and liquid waste minimisation and handling including airfield maintenance area pollution prevention, storage and spillages etc. land side and terminal buildings,
• TMA efficiency vs noise trade-offs analysis,
• Community relations effectiveness review- which could be any or all of neighbour relations and complaints handling; social/perception surveys; land-use planning capacity protection effectiveness, future development risk analysis,
• Bird strike risk analysis and mitigation,
• Noise mitigation, monitoring and modelling,
• Aircraft track-keeping.
CONSULTING
ENVISA’s independence and integrity allow us to offer high-value consulting services to all stakeholders in the transportation chain, from manufacturing to regulators and operators. We outline some of our capabilities below, with examples of support we have provided in the past.
ENVISA provides a full range of services to support airport planners and managers facing the challenges of sustainability.
This includes:
• strategic noise mapping in accordance with European Directive 2002/49/EC, community management,
• local air quality modelling and mapping,
• environmental impact assessment of ATM procedures (i.e. new landing and take-off, preferential runway..),
• noise vs. emissions trade-off analyses,
• designing, developing and validating noise and local air quality models (including dispersion models),
• cost-benefit analyses and life cycle assessment
ENVISA’s services relevant to airlines include:
• assessing gate-to-gate fuel burn and emissions related to specific fleets and trajectories,
• assessing noise, fuel burn and emission tradeoffs for new landing and take-off procédures,
• conducting market analyses for future concepts and regulations in the air transport industry.
ENVISA’s activities relevant to Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) include:
• assessing the environmental impact of airspace réorganisations,
• designing, developing and validating multiple-scale noise and emission modelling tools (including weather and atmospheric modelling),
• designing and developing flight movement and gate-to-gate trajectory databases,
• performing ATM market and cost-benefit analyses.
ENVISA’s services to aircraft and engine manufacturers include:
• investigating future regulatory and operational concepts for aviation and their environmental / economic impact,
• investigating the environmental benefits of future propulsion technologies,
• assessing the environmental impact of new flight procedures either en-route or during the Landing and Take-Off (LTO) cycle.
AUDITING AND BEST PRACTICES
• Planning: Strategic and Environmental planning, Airport infrastructure planning and design, and International project coordination.
• Assessment: Environmental impact, Environmental performance, Evaluation/reduction of carbon foot print, Emissions and waste, Environmental tradeoffs (emissions, noise, fuel, air pollution).
• Management: including basic concepts of environmental concerns in aviation, Legal framework for aviation, Environmental control and reporting, ATM/ATC environmental concept development, Cost benefits and efficiency, Safety and security solutions, Integrated management system, Performance based project management, Global Emissions Best Practices, and guidance for best practice on aircraft noise management.
• ENVISA is a certified to audit and conduct assessments using the GHG emissions diagnostic tool ‘Bilan Carbone®’ developed by ADEME (French Agency for Environment & Energy Management).
Airport emissions and ACA (Airport carbon accreditation):
In the last years, ENVISA provided "ACA" carbon accreditation support to airports worldwide. Many airports including heliports received their Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3-3+ accreditation thanks to dedicated best practice methodologies and data provision by Envisa's expert team.
As a result of growing concern for air quality, Envisa has conducted a number of airport emission studies in the framework of the ALAQS project, but also in other contexts. Among others, ENVISA staff conducted emission inventories for European airports such as Bucharest Henri Coanda Int’l, Warsaw Chopin Int’l, London Heathrow, London City, Nice, Lyon, ADP, etc. ENVISA has been involved in the development of ICAO/CAEP airport emission and local air quality guidance material.
Environmental Regulations Support for EASA:
ENVISA is supporting EASA under two framework contracts for the development of CO2 metrics and assessments of a range of proposed metrics against a large variety of criteria under ICOA/CAEP. These assessments have been reported to the CAEP WG3 CO2TG meetings and have contributed to the agreement of a metric system.
Green Technology Assessment:
ENVISA has supported SAFRAN/Honeywell in assessing the environmental benefits of EGTS, an innovative electric green taxiing system that will deliver significant fuel savings for airlines as well as reducing aviation emissions at airports. ENVISA developed a detailed ground movement assessment method based on ICAO recognized data sources and methods.
EASA/EUROCONTROL STAPES (System for Airport Noise Exposure Studies):
ENVISA was in charge of collecting and formatting the input flight movement data for the 28 airports in EUROCONTROL’s multi-airport noise model STAPES. This included the processing of the CAEP/8 data for the STAPES airports.
Open ALAQS:
ENVISA has developed, validated and maintained EUROCONTROL's Airport Local Air Quality Studies (ALAQS) over the past 10 years. This includes the coding of the fundamental core of the model and its interface, integration with ArcGIS for graphically visualising and manipulating data, and post processing outputs for use by other applications. ENVISA also conducted the full ICAO CAEP Verification & Validation process for aviation Local Air Quality models with ALAQS. ENVISA collaborated with Henri Coanda airport on the ALAQS case study, where emissions and local air quality modeling is conducted. Finally, ENVISA was recently awarded a contract to convert ALAQS from ArcView, a commercial GIS, to an open source GIS software, QGIS.
NATS assessment of Local Air Quality:
ENVISA provided UK NATS with local air quality studies (aircraft emission inventories and dispersion analyses) at Heathrow and London City in order to evaluate the environmental impact of changes in operating procedures in the context of the development of Heathrow’s third runway.
World Interconnected Sources Database of Operational Movements – WISDOM:
ENVISA was mandated to improve the quality of EUROCONTROL’s WISDOM database of global flight movements and trajectories, notably by designing interfaces with Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
CO2 Metric (ICAO):
ENVISA developed more than a hundred candidate metrics for aircraft CO2 emissions based on technical parameters such as wingspan, take-off weight, floor area, number of seats, payload, etc. in support of the EASA for the selection and definition of new ICAO CO2 metric (recently approved in July 2012 by the CAEP Steering Committee).
Traffic / Demand Forecast:
The aim of this EUROCONTROL project is to provide a new statistical methodology for forecasting traffic demand in the short, medium and long term. Unlike previous models, these forecasts make use of confirmed future flight intentions as well as historical trends to more accurately generate a baseline from which the forecasting model can run. The objectives are to take the expert knowledge of the individuals who currently perform this task based on years of experience and intuition and to generate a statistical method based on this knowledge that is capable of reliably and consistently predicting baseline cases with an indication of their likely representativeness. This activity belongs to the project P7.6.5 DCB as part of the SESAR Work Package 07.
