Emissions from international aviation could triple by 2045 and jeopardize the sector's goals

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By Nicolas Meunier – Consultant

In an article published last February, Carbone 4 highlighted the challenge of aligning with a 2°C target while maintaining strong traffic growth. Now it is the turn of the ICAO, the UN agency responsible for civil aviation, to sound the alarm about CO2 emissions from international air traffic, which it predicts will increase by a factor of 2.2 to 3.1 by 2045. [1] Indeed, according to the ICAO, the two measures intended to curb the surge in CO2 emissions—namely energy efficiency and the use of alternative fuels,will not be able to offset the effects of a threefold increase in air traffic, over the period. Even in its most optimistic scenario, ICAO forecasts an improvement in energy efficiency of 1.37% per year (in addition to the energy savings associated with the natural renewal of the fleet based on today’s standards), which remains significantly below the ambitious target of 2% per year endorsed by the industry.

Furthermore, the organization believes that Alternative fuels will account for only 2.6% of consumption of international air travel in 2025, and while it is noted that it is “physically possible” to meet all needs with alternative fuels by 2050, this would require “extremely significant” investments and substantial political support, which therefore remains highly uncertain. While the International Air Transport Association (IATA, the airline federation) forecasts that total passenger traffic (domestic and international) will grow in line with ICAO projections (a doubling of traffic within 20 years) [2], one might wonder How the Air Travel Industry Will Achieve Its Environmental Goals.

In fact, given a similar growth rate, CO2 emissions from domestic air travel are expected to follow a similar trend to those from international air travel. However, even when combining the most optimistic scenarios for both emission reduction measures (1.37% annual improvement in energy efficiency and 100% alternative fuels), CO2 emissions, at the very least for international transport, will be at the same level in 2050 as in 2005, according to the ICAO (see chart below*), even though the sector’s goal is to reduce them by 50% over this period. * This graph is ambiguous because it appears to combine a life-cycle approach for emissions from alternative fuels, on the one hand, with emissions from combustion alone for conventional kerosene (see the 2005 entry).

Alexandre de Juniac, IATA’s director general, recently emphasized that the aviation industry had not communicated sufficiently about its environmental goals [3]; Perhaps we should now focus on how to achieve them and make them realistic?

Sources: [1] Greenair [2] IATA [3] The Tribune