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In 2021, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced its goal for the global aviation industry to meet net-zero emissions by 2050. The International Civil Aviation Organisation reinforced the commitment to this target at the most recent UN Climate Change Conference. While there are a number of ways to drive aircraft decarbonisation, in recent years, there has been an increased focus on sustainable fuel to power flight.
What is the EU Taxonomy?
Essentially, this is an attempt to identify certain economic activities that qualify as ‘environmentally sustainable’ in order encourage investment in those activities.
Continue Reading Define and conquer: What might the EU Taxonomy mean for aviation?
In an article a few weeks ago on ‘How tech went big on green energy’, the Financial Times referred to a report released in February by Lancaster University and Small World Consulting, which found that the information and communication technology sector (i.e. IT) ‘is estimated to form ca. 1.8-2.8% of global GHG emissions in 2020’[1]. That, the FT noted, ‘is roughly the same as emissions from the aviation sector’[2].
Continue Reading Greening pains: How are we going to finance sustainable aviation fuel?
Developments in environmental regulation for the aviation industry have gathered momentum over the last year, notwithstanding the challenges arising from the pandemic and the related groundings.
Last month saw the publication of plans for the UK Emissions Trading System, which is proposed to take the place of the European Union Emissions Trading System when the UK leaves the EU at the end of 2020. The baseline emissions reference period for the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation has also very recently been adjusted to reflect the dramatic drop in 2020 aviation emissions resulting from responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, in the context of a heated debate over long-term environmental goals and the aviation industry’s survival. You can read more about this in our earlier blog on the topic here.
Aviation is reportedly responsible for 2 per cent of global carbon emissions, and in the last 12 months we have all had to come to terms with Extinction Rebellion protests and ‘flyksgam’ (discussed in this piece by Ashleigh Standen last autumn). The industry is very aware of the need to reduce its carbon footprint – both for green reasons and to help mitigate its exposure to oil price fluctuations. However, the drivers are frequently external factors. We had become familiar with the push by financial institutions, which are subject to increased regulatory requirements and public scrutiny, as part of a drive for increased sustainability. However, as attention turns to what emergence from the pandemic might look like and our prospects of entrenching green imperatives in our recovery infrastructure, one of the major points of discussion in aviation is the ‘green strings’ attached to government bailouts of airlines.
Continue Reading Airline bailouts: a golden opportunity to take balance sheets from red, to black, to green
The landscape of environmental regulation is changing for aviation operators, due to a powerful combination of global pressures to reduce emissions for one of the transportation sectors with the largest emissions outputs. Plans have recently been published for the UK Emissions Trading System (UK ETS), which is proposed to take the place of the EU ETS when the UK leaves the European Union at the end of 2020.
Plans to establish a baseline emissions reference for the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) have also been adjusted to reflect the dramatic drop in 2020 aviation emissions resulting from responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, in the context of a heated debate over long-term environmental goals and the aviation industry’s survival.
I went to the Bath Children’s Literature Festival a couple of weekends ago, and at one of the events a very well-known illustrator mentioned that the main focus of the climate strike movement was aviation, before going on to suggest that in her opinion another industry was more particularly culpable. A hall full of primary school children (and their parents) nodded soberly – this was not news to them. They know what ‘flygskam’ means.
It is a commonplace in the press at the moment that the aviation industry is a major contributor to humanity’s carbon emissions, especially with the renewed efforts of Extinction Rebellion also hitting headlines. Private aviation is an especially soft target, with high-profile (and even royal) individuals and occasions attracting criticism for their use of corporate and personal aircraft.
The thing is, I have been trying to write this blog post for months now, hoping to be able to do some research and identify some positives to try to respond to this, but there is a dizzying amount of press coverage of the issue every week, and a bewildering number of industry reports from the last twelve months alone, and it is exceptionally difficult to find a unifying message or distil an accurate sense of the progress we are making – even if, like me, you work in the sector and are actively looking for some digestible takeaways.
Continue Reading Means, motivation and opportunity: How can we better respond to flygskam?
The Extinction Rebellion protests in London have finally died down, after several weeks of aggravation and disruption to City commuters making their way to work, protestors gluing themselves to overground trains and grinding traffic on Waterloo Bridge and at Oxford Circus to a halt. Their execution was annoying, but they had a point. Serious remedial action needs to be taken within the next 12 years, or humans will have taken our fragile environmental state one step too far away from recovery. The automotive, rail and shipping industries have already put electrification and environmentally conscious fuel-saving on the menu. Why then has the aviation industry, known to be a development trailblazer, not yet been able to make hybridisation more readily available in the commercial aviation space?
It may well be a question of scale. Batteries used for electric cars are fairly small and therefore easier to manufacture. Overall, battery packs are heavier than their combustion engine counterparts. Aircraft-grade batteries are weighing in between 2 and 3 metric tons (that’s Range Rover heavy). This means that aircraft manufacturers will need smarter materials to reduce some weight to compensate for those heavy batteries and their cooling systems.
Continue Reading Fight or flight? The eternal battle for efficiency
We are observing a distinct uptick in press coverage of aviation in the context of climate change discussions of various kinds at the moment. The headline item is, of course, the conversation about the proposed place of aviation within the Green New Deal plans in the United States, and what that might look like in
Aviation seems to be facing a fuel-related existential crisis at the moment, as pressures mount on the industry from various angles.
Within asset finance generally the major discussion is the looming bite of the IMO 2020 regulations, which will reduce the amount of sulphur permitted in ship fuel oil to a limit of 0.50 per cent mass by mass from 1 January 2020. Aside from the huge impact this will have on the world’s vessel owners and operators, it is also anticipated that there will be knock-on effects for aviation.
The aviation industry is a major contributor to the world’s carbon emission and greenhouse gas problem, generating 2% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions and estimated to account for 3% by 2050. The UK’s aviation sector, for example, was responsible for 34 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2012, a figure forecast to rise to 43.5 million tonnes by 2030 [1].
The huge volume of commercial aviation activity, the long distances we now travel, the massive amount of fuel burned to power the equipment, the release of emissions directly into higher levels of the atmosphere, the ever-growing demand for capacity – this all adds up to a very knotty problem for the industry to address. How can we better balance the need to accommodate unprecedented growth in demand with the environmental imperative to fly far less than we already do?
There are a number of methods currently in use, of varying levels of effectiveness.
Continue Reading Wanted: Blue sky solution to big green problem