As the Cathay Pacific Group continues to make significant strides towards becoming a sustainability leader, it is pleased to announce the release of its 2022 Sustainable Development Report, which underscores the Group’s ongoing commitments and progress in achieving its sustainability goals. The ‘Greener Together’ report reflects Cathay Pacific’s belief that driving progress towards a sustainable future requires solid partnerships and collective action.
Ronald Lam, Chief Executive Officer of Cathay Pacific Group, stated, “As we enter an exciting new phase of rebuilding Cathay Pacific for Hong Kong, one of our key development areas is becoming a leader in sustainability. This means working with many different stakeholders, partners and corporate customers to reconnect Hong Kong to the world sustainably. The title of this year’s report, ‘Greener Together’, reflects our determination to foster stronger partnerships to help drive the sustainable development agenda and build a more sustainable future for our customers, people, and communities.
“Despite the tough start to the year, 2022 saw some important milestones achieved in our sustainability journey. These involved yet more important steps towards developing the Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) supply chain, reducing single-use plastics in our operations and continuing to advance the agenda of wellness and diversity for our people. Moving people forward is our business, and as we look ahead to the future, we are excited to continue contributing to important projects and being a positive driving force towards making aviation more sustainable.”
Key highlights from the 2022 report include:
- Driving progress towards decarbonisation: As part of efforts to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and use SAF for 10% of our total fuel consumption by 2030, we launched Asia’s first primary Corporate SAF Programme. Garnering support from eight launch customers, the programme sends a strong signal to the SAF supply chain that there is strong interest in the region.
- Extending our carbon offset programme: First launched in 2007, Cathay Pacific’s long-standing voluntary carbon offset programme, Fly Greener, has now been extended to our cargo operations – a vital part of our business. This provides our customers with a more sustainable cargo solution.
- Surpassing our target to cut single-use plastics: We have reached a 56% reduction of single-use plastics used per-passenger level compared to our 2018 baseline and are launching a new target.\
- Driving Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) across our operations: We set a new and more ambitious goal to not have more than 65% of the same gender in senior positions by 2025, and as of April 2023, we will have a 50/50 gender split in our Executive Committee. We also became the first commercial airline on the 2023 Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index.
- Promoting and enabling wellness:COVID-19 has been incredibly impactful on people’s well-being. We introduced a week-long Mental Health and Well-being Festival with various activities and workshops to promote wellness and support our people.