Time to upgrade Europe’s aviation pollution rules – it should not be allowed to risk the Paris agreement
The European Parliament’s environment committee (ENVI) has voted on how the aviation sector should be treated under the EU’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), in response to a decision by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) to set up a global offsetting mechanism. The ongoing revision of Europe’s carbon market rules for aviation is a critical opportunity to ensure that one of the biggest global polluters starts to contribute its fair share to EU climate action. While the term ‘sustainable aviation’ seems to be spreading, the reality is that the sector’s emissions are growing unsustainably and will continue to do so. Even if the global aviation deal is fully implemented and enforced, it will not curb the industry’s rising emissions. Though just intra-EU flights are included in the EU ETS, unlike other sectors – aviation is not expected to annually reduce its emissions. Add the fact that the industry is exempt from fuel taxes, VAT or legally-binding fuel efficiency requirements, and it becomes clear aviation enjoys very special treatment. While greenhouse gas emissions from all other sectors in the EU carbon market fell in 2016, those from aviation grew by 8%. This risks putting the goals of the Paris climate agreement out of reach. With no quick solutions in sight, the sector needs to pay a real price for its pollution. A high enough carbon price would help.
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Now is the time to upgrade Europe’s aviation pollution rules
By Kelsey Perlman (Carbon Market Watch)
Wed 12 July 2017
Yesterday, the European Parliament’s environment committee (ENVI) voted on how the aviation sector should be treated under the EU’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), in response to a decision by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to set up a global offsetting mechanism.
The ongoing revision of Europe’s carbon market rules for aviation is a critical opportunity to ensure that one of the biggest global polluters starts to contribute its fair share to EU climate action. While the term ‘sustainable aviation’ seems to be spreading, the reality is that the sector’s emissions are growing unsustainably and will continue to do so. Even if the global aviation deal is fully implemented and enforced, it will not curb the industry’s rising emissions, writes Kelsey Perlman.
So what can be done in Europe now to address aviation’s climate impact?
Transport has become Europe’s biggest pollution problem, and the need to decarbonise the sector is a growing challenge. However, different modes of transport are subject to very different climate ambitions. Electric trains are covered by the EU’s carbon market, and road transport must cut its emissions under a law known as the Effort Sharing Regulation that regulates sectors which are not part of the emissions trading scheme.
Flights within the EU are also included in the EU ETS, but – unlike other sectors – aviation is not expected to annually reduce its emissions. Add the fact that the industry is exempt from fuel taxes, VAT or legally-binding fuel efficiency requirements, and it becomes clear aviation enjoys very special treatment.
It doesn’t come as a surprise then that while greenhouse gas emissions from all other sectors in the EU carbon market fell in 2016, those from aviation grew by 8%. This is a worrying trend that risks putting the goals of the Paris climate agreement out of reach.
Starting from the next phase of the EU ETS in 2021, the European Commission has proposed to apply an annually declining cap also for aviation emissions under the EU ETS – a proposal supported by ENVI. While this will not alone solve aviation’s climate problem, it is a step in the right direction.
A higher price on carbon
With no quick solutions in sight, the sector needs to pay a real price for its pollution. A high enough carbon price would incentivise more efficiency and level the playing field for other, less polluting means of transport, such as railways, thus reducing overall emissions.
Under the EU’s carbon market, the airlines currently get 85% of their pollution permits for free, and pay around €5 ($6) per tonne of CO2 emitted for the rest. It is a far cry from an effective price on pollution – at least $40 by 2020 according to the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition’s High Level Commission on Carbon Prices. A parallel revision of the EU’s carbon market rules must reduce the massive surplus on the market in order to bring the prices up to more adequate levels.
In a welcome move, the ENVI lawmakers recommend that airlines should buy 50% of their allowances, as opposed to the current 15%.
The Parliament is expected to adopt its final position at a plenary session in September, with talks to find a final compromise following shortly afterwards involving the Parliament, EU Member States and the Commission.
Despite the low carbon price under the EU ETS, the airline industry wishes to see the EU scheme replaced by the global offsetting measure, fittingly referred to by airlines as their “licence to grow”.
Entering into force in 2021, with a voluntary phase until 2027, ICAO’s global scheme, known as CORSIA, wants airlines to purchase offset credits for their future growth. There are serious doubts about many of these credits, as they might not lead to real emissions reductions, and could even risk human rights violations in the offset project host countries. The average price of offsets is currently an unimpressive 21 cents – 200 times less than the social cost of carbon pollution.
In response to sluggish progress on effective international action, national carbon pricing initiatives for the aviation sector have been popping up recently to ensure airlines pay for their pollution. The UK, Norway and Germany are currently enforcing environmental taxes, with Sweden in the process of introducing a carbon tax for aviation as well. These initiatives put aviation on a path to address its climate impact, but are heavily opposed by the industry, which demands continued exemptions from such efforts to reduce the sector’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Letting aviation industry continue to increase its emissions while others have to reduce them is not only unfair, it is driving dangerous climate change that we have committed to fight under the Paris Agreement.
Europe now has the opportunity to improve aviation pollution rules by asking airlines to pay for and reduce their emissions like everyone else. This is a test of our decision makers’ resolve to stand up for the accord reached in Paris and a safer future.
Kelsey Perlman is the aviation policy officer at Carbon Market Watch, a pressure group advocating for fair and effective climate protection.
http://www.greenaironline.com/news.php?viewStory=2390
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Is aviation climate policy heading in the right direction?
03/07/17 (Adjacent, Open Access)
Cait Hewitt, Deputy Director of the Aviation Environment Federation looks at aviation emissions and whether we’re on course to tackle them
If the aviation sector was a country it would be seventh in a world ranking of CO2 emitters. Unchecked, its climate impact is set to triple by 2050. Technology improvements can’t keep pace with passenger growth, and while most sectors are on course to decarbonise over the coming years and decades, aircraft will remain dependent on fossil fuels for as far into the future as anyone can see.
When the Kyoto Protocol was agreed in 1997, unresolved questions about how best to allocate international aviation emissions among states led to them being left out of national targets, and the UN’s specialist aviation agency ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) was instead given the task of tackling the sector’s growing emissions. A decade of prevarication followed.
But in 2008 progress on the issue suddenly moved up the agenda. With the EU’s plans to bypass ICAO and incorporate all flights to and from EU airports in its Emissions Trading System, generating acrimonious retaliatory talk of widespread non-compliance and trade wars, plans for a global solution that all states could get behind finally started to get some attention.
Will carbon offsetting be effective?
In 2016 ICAO celebrated its agreement to implement a Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) beginning in 2020 and requiring any growth in aviation emissions from that year on to be ‘offset’ through the purchase of emissions units generated by CO2 cuts in other sectors. Whether or not the scheme will be effective remains to be seen, however.
At present, CORSIA is far less ambitious than the 2015 Paris Agreement – the landmark global climate deal which aims for no more than 1.5 degrees of warming and total decarbonisation of our economies. Environmental organisations successfully lobbied for the inclusion of a review mechanism in CORSIA, to allow for tougher carbon targets to be set over time, but it is not certain that these periodic opportunities will lead to improvements. Negotiations about what offset credits and activities will be eligible – whether to allow contentious forestry credits, for example – are ongoing. Also Trump’s determination to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, while not directly impacting CORSIA, casts a shadow of doubt over whether the US will continue to support the scheme.
More fundamentally, does carbon offsetting offer an effective response to the global climate challenge, as its advocates argue, or is it merely a way of putting off difficult decisions? The UK’s statutory advisory body, the Committee on Climate Change, has advised that market based measures should be seen as only a short to medium term solution for tackling aviation emissions, arguing that the sector should be preparing for deep cuts in its own emissions. Europe voted this year not to accept international offset credits for compliance with its emissions reduction targets under the Paris Agreement.
The need for domestic action
What action, then, should EU states themselves be taking to ensure that their aviation activity doesn’t undermine climate change commitments? It’s a question that is perhaps only just starting to bite. In February this year an Austrian court overruled a planned airport expansion on the basis that it would be incompatible with the country’s climate change law. The UK government is currently pursuing an expansion of Heathrow Airport, but has presented no answers on how the scheme can be compatible with the country’s Climate Change Act, despite a court ruling in 2010, the last time a third runway was on the table, that the government’s suggestion that airport expansion was somehow divorced from climate law was “untenable in law and common sense” and that it must review its plans.
While CORSIA was at one level ground-breaking – it signalled a global acceptance that aviation emissions are a problem and that policy action is needed to tackle it – critical questions about what role aviation should play in a zero carbon future remain, for the most part, even to be asked let alone answered. Does a globalised outlook make it impossible to question the continued growth in air travel? Or will the digital age allow us to find ways to stay connected without the need to travel? Are direct air connections critical for global trade, or can our future connectivity needs be met without a continued proliferation of expansion by states seeking to out-compete each other with boasts about having the biggest and best airports?
Decisions we take now can have far-reaching consequences. Airport infrastructure is seen as long-term investment, for example, and the economic case for a new Heathrow runway is based on an assessment over 60 years. But while analysis suggests that achieving the Paris Agreement will require our economies to be zero emissions by 2070, we have yet to have a public or political conversation about what that could mean for the role of flying in our economies and our lives.
Cait Hewitt
Deputy Director
Aviation Environment Federation
info@aef.org.uk
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