Reopening airport 'will damage environment'

Climate experts have said that reopening Doncaster Sheffield Airport would "damage the environment" and have questioned whether it is a good use of public money.

The Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, which works in collaboration with the University of Sheffield, said in a report that reopening the site could not be justified during a "climate crisis".

This week it was revealed that more than £100m of public funds would be needed for the project after Doncaster Council failed to secure the necessary private sector investment.

The Mayor of South Yorkshire, OIiver Coppard, said he was committed to protecting the interests of the region's taxpayers.

Richard Sulley, senior research fellow at the Grantham Centre, said: "When we are looking at investing public money, we really need to see published what else we could be doing with it. Is this the best thing to do with a significant amount of public investment?

"The committee on climate change, the independent body that advises government, says we should not have more airport expansion until there is a process in place to manage the number of flights that leave the UK.

"The authorities are stressing this will be about building sustainable aviation, but the technologies don't exist yet so there will be a period where aviation fuel is being burned.

"Aviation has a disproportionate effect on the environment. It's not just about carbon emissions, it is also about the contrails and the nitrous oxide that planes leave behind as they fly so it really is damaging to the environment."

In 2019 Doncaster Council declared a climate emergency and Coppard said politicians in the region took climate change "incredibly seriously".

"We have the biggest share of clean tech jobs in the whole of the country but we are going to fly in the future so we need to fly sustainably and South Yorkshire can be part of that solution.

"South Yorkshire has to be right at the forefront of that revolution in terms of sustainable aviation and we have the University of Sheffield leading on that nationally, if not internationally.

"South Yorkshire is going to be the future of those industries, and I want the airport to be where we put those industries, so that we can grow the economy but also fly sustainably going forward."

Doncaster North's MP, Ed Miliband, is also the secretary of state for energy and climate change.

His department has previously said the airport's reopening is a commercial and local authority matter.

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