IATA boss rows back on climate change comments Meanwhile an industry misstep came from an interview that IATA chief executive Alexandre de Juniac gave to the New Scientist.
In the interview, he made a number of points that we would caution against from a communications and positioning point of view. Criticising Greta Thunberg, he said “we are not the only polluter on the planet.” would stay in his own small village, behind his walls” The wider optics of a white middle aged aviation industry CEO attacking a Swedish teenager (and Time’s person of the year) are not great. The whole tone also sounds defensive, and obscures much of his later comments on how the industry is trying to make a difference. Our advice to any airline CEO would be to avoid criticising Thunberg directly. Here is what we’d recommend instead: Acknowledge her wider concerns about climate change and her commitment to making the world a better place. Talk about how aviation has made the world smaller. Say that the industry wants Thunberg’s generation to benefit from the magic of flight in a sustainable way. And then give examples of how this is happening. However, perhaps worst of all, the New Scientist claimed that de Juniac said “I’ve never been totally scientifically convinced that it was the CO2 that was the key element for the climate change.” IATA then had to quickly correct this in a statement given to Adam Vaughan, the journalist who carried out the interview, with de Juniac now saying “CO2 is the top contributor to climate change.”
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Airline Marketing Monthly | January 2020
He then claimed that her activism would lead to a world where “everybody
