Doncaster Robin Hood Airport has outlined its plans for continued expansion of passenger and freight through to 2030 in its Draft Airport Master Plan. How this fits into the recent UK commitment to reduce CO2 emissions is quite beyond us. Perhaps the passenger contribution towards tree planting, the £500 raised from cardboard recycling and the toilet fed by a grey water system somehow offset the global damage?
But sod climate change: these credit crunched times are all about job creation. Airport developers always dig up this old chestnut as a sure-fire vote winner, but is it actually true? Recent cost-cutting strategies within the aviation sector have resulted in hundreds of redundancies and measures such as automated check in are hardly going to help. Reports by John Whitelegg, Professor of Sustainable Transport at Liverpool John Moores University, and Wiz Baines of Groundswell show that airport expansion destroys more jobs than it creates through encouraging overseas tourism and investment, not to mention the economic impacts of environmental degradation, health damage and climate change.
