Lufthansa Group has refreshed its climate protection portfolio with a sharper tilt towards technology-led carbon removal, including its first backing of direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS), a move that signals where Europe’s largest network carrier sees the next decade of corporate aviation decarbonisation heading.
The Cologne-based group, which operates Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, Eurowings, ITA Airways, Lufthansa and Swiss, said its newly compiled portfolio now comprises 14 climate protection projects, certified to the highest international standards and delivered across its home markets of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Italy, as well as further afield.
Passengers travelling with the group’s airlines made contributions equivalent to more than 710,000 metric tonnes of CO2 last year by choosing more sustainable travel options, a 20 per cent increase on the previous year. Business travellers can buy in through the group’s Green Fares, which bundle a mix of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) use and carbon compensation into the ticket price.
Doubling down on removals
The portfolio is split into two strands: avoidance projects, which prevent emissions outside the airline industry, for example, through energy-efficient cookstoves or modular biogas plants, and removal projects, which actively pull existing CO2 out of the atmosphere and lock it away for the long term.
The share of projects designed to permanently remove CO2 has been doubled and now accounts for around 20 per cent of the refreshed portfolio. Among them are initiatives that extract carbon from the air through photosynthesis before binding it as biochar, alongside the group’s first commitment to DACCS, a technology that filters CO2 directly from ambient air for underground storage.
It is a direction of travel that mirrors moves elsewhere in the sector, with carriers including British Airways having emerged as the UK’s largest purchaser of carbon removals as the industry looks beyond traditional offsets towards durable, engineered solutions. The International Air Transport Association expects offsetting and carbon capture, including DAC, to deliver up to 19 per cent of the emissions cuts needed to take global aviation to net zero by 2050.
‘An important building block’
Nina Sproedt, head of sustainability at Lufthansa Group, said the refreshed line-up was deliberately weighted towards engineered approaches. “Climate protection projects, which complement our own emission reduction measures, are an important building block on the path to more sustainable aviation and the achievement of our climate goals,” she said.
“With our carefully curated portfolio, we are increasingly focusing on technology-based projects that enable long-term CO2 sequestration. In this way, we are contributing to the further development and scaling of these technologies.”
The group, which has previously deployed artificial intelligence to cut food waste across its catering operations, said the DACCS investment would help advance a technology still in its commercial infancy but seen by many analysts as essential to dealing with residual aviation emissions that cannot be eliminated through fleet renewal, operational efficiencies or SAF alone.
What it means for corporate buyers
For travel managers writing sustainable procurement clauses into 2026 air programmes, the message from Frankfurt is clear: the supplier-side conversation is shifting from headline net-zero pledges to the credibility and durability of the underlying carbon credits. Permanent removals, of the kind DACCS is designed to deliver, are increasingly the currency that satisfies both corporate scope 3 reporting and the tougher questions now coming from finance, legal and ESG functions.
