The aviation sector plans to double its passenger traffic by 2050. Such rapid growth raises serious concerns about the aviation sector’s climate impact. The EU’s climate package is starting to yield results. But does it go far enough?
European aviation has a growth problem. The sector plans to grow at uncontrollable rates, at a time when it is meant to reduce its emissions. What can policy makers do to address growth and to boost the uptake of green technologies for aviation?
2025 marks a turning point for clean aviation with the phase-in of two major EU initiatives on sustainable aviation fuels and contrails.
Thanks to the EU’s law on SAFs (ReFuelEU Aviation), from 2025, the share of SAF uplifted at EU airports will be 2%. This will increase exponentially to 70% by 2050. Thanks to this law, the use of sustainable aviation fuels has increased in Europe and airlines are using more and more SAF in their tanks.
Some airlines are even going above and beyond the law: at least five European airlines have pledged to use more SAF than required by the legislation (Air France-KLM, DHL Group, Finnair, SAS Group and Wizz Air) and at least 11 European airlines have some form of e-kerosene related agreement.
In a world-first, Europe will start monitoring contrails on flights within the EU in 2025. This will help advance scientific research on the topic but also pave the way for future legislation to start reducing contrails further down the line.
Through the non-CO2 MRV, more than 5 million flights, or more than 125Mt CO2eq (average warming impact over 20 years) of contrail warming, will be monitored every year.
Whilst the EU introduced first-of-its-kind legislation, the scope of the law was reduced from covering all flights departing from Europe to intra-EU only. This means that 67% of contrail warming impact has been left out from the scope. In the next revision of the law, the EU should not bow to pressure from the industry and monitor contrails on all flights departing Europe.
If we perform contrail avoidance for the flights in the current non-CO2 MRV, we can already avoid 50 Mt CO2eq of contrail warming. By including extra-EU flights, this number can be tripled.
Europe’s carbon market has been in place since 2012. This mechanism ensures that emissions from aviation are priced.
Sources:
For the 3 numbers on top of the page: Eurostat and OAG. Source for the ETS prices: ICAP. ETS revenues were estimated by multiplying paid emissions by average allocation price on a given year.