ATAG 2026 General Assembly and working groups
ATAG General Assembly
The 2026 ATAG General Assembly was held in London on 21 April 2026. More than 20 of ATAG’s members joined the meeting.
In Haldane’s annual review of activities, he summarised that ATAG had organised more than 60 meetings, working groups and events during the previous year, including:
- 9 working group meetings, including to develop the Waypoint 2050 report
- 3 joint in-person events on SAF and aviation’s decarbonisation
- 5 information webinars
- 2 in-person meetings of the communicators’ working group as well as 2 virtual briefings
- 6 Path to Net Zero briefings.
In addition, ATAG had given over 20 presentations in-person at external events and four virtual presentations, as well as holding numerous one-to-one meetings.
ATAG working groups
Each year, ATAG sets up various working groups, which bring together experts from across the industry to collaborate, provide input, direction and decision-making on ATAG’s key priorities. The following working groups have been established for 2026.
- Communications. See separate articles on communication and social media activites, Waypoint 2050 and Aviation: Benefits Beyond Borders.
- Climate finance metrics. The group is continuing work on accounting and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions and helping integrate and harmonise methodologies across aviation industry stakeholders. In this context, the group is monitoring activities of the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), with whom the group held a joint call in March, to clarify aviation-specific guidance.
- Energy transition. The role of this group is to help support the scale up of SAF production capacity and to also look at the scale up of hydrogen and its allocation for aviation. Activities have been focused on drafting a SAF policy state of play report for internal industry use, which we hope to make available later in the year. Some initial discussions on a direction for the CAAF/4 meeting have also been held. Draft industry messaging is under development around the importance of SAF in the longer-term energy security strategy and the group is working on a SAF financing paper for the 7th ICAO Air Transport Conference in November.
- Non-CO2 and contrails. This group is working together to coordinate inputs to ICAO as well as responses to other initiatives and public communications on non-CO2 and contrails. It will provide a platform for the various industry sub-working groups (at ICCAIA, CANSO, IATA and A4A) to convene an information sharing session later in the year.
There are also currently two ad-hoc task groups on:
- COP31. See separate article.
- ICAO ATConf/7. The task group will bring together aviation associations and other experts to work on input to the ICAO Air Transport Conference in November 2026.
Participation in the working groups is usually for Principal Partner and Strategic Associate members, with other industry representatives joining on an invitation basis, to provide a fair geographical balance, or because of their specific skills. Please contact Anna Patient (patienta@atag.org) for more information.