Brent Pin­heiro

brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt

In 2022, the air­line in­dus­try ac­count­ed for 2 per cent of the world’s car­bon emis­sions. But, for an in­dus­try with a stat­ed goal to achieve net ze­ro CO2 emis­sions by 2050, 2 per cent is two too much.

Re­cent geopo­lit­i­cal events have trig­gered con­cerns with­in the In­ter­na­tion­al Air Trans­port As­so­ci­a­tion (IA­TA) that the in­dus­try may strug­gle to hit its tar­gets, though not for a lack of try­ing. Over the last sev­er­al weeks, in­ter­na­tion­al air­lines have qui­et­ly been rout­ing flights away from Venezue­lan air­space, af­ter the US Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Ad­min­is­tra­tion (FAA) is­sued a safe­ty warn­ing for pi­lots op­er­at­ing in the re­gion. Caribbean Air­lines’ Port of Spain-Cu­ra­cao ser­vice and Co­pa Air­lines’ Pana­ma-Port of Spain ser­vice have both seen trav­el times in­crease by ap­prox­i­mate­ly 30 min­utes. These more cir­cuitous paths en­sure safe­ty but come at an en­vi­ron­men­tal cost.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia last week at IA­TA’s Glob­al Me­dia Day in Gene­va, Switzer­land, Marie Owens Thom­sen, se­nior vice pres­i­dent of sus­tain­abil­i­ty & chief econ­o­mist, ex­plained the en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact.

“The longer [the] flight hours, the more fu­el con­sump­tion, and the high­er the CO2 emis­sions. The sum of that ob­vi­ous­ly makes it hard­er to re­duce the CO2 emis­sions over­all. So, we would have to some­how com­pen­sate for that mirac­u­lous­ly else­where. And that is very dif­fi­cult.”

Ac­cord­ing to da­ta from the In­ter­na­tion­al Civ­il Avi­a­tion Or­ga­ni­za­tion (ICAO), a ful­ly loaded Boe­ing 737 Max 8 op­er­at­ing a re­turn flight be­tween Port of Spain and Cu­ra­cao now gen­er­ates 28.78 met­ric tonnes of CO2 – a 27 per cent in­crease in the flight’s to­tal car­bon foot­print.

Even with­out these longer flight times, the jour­ney to car­bon neu­tral by 2050 is an up­hill bat­tle. Ac­cord­ing to IA­TA, the de­mand for in­di­vid­ual air pas­sen­ger jour­neys in 2050 could ex­ceed 10 bil­lion, cre­at­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 21.2 gi­ga­tons of CO2 emis­sions along the way. The as­so­ci­a­tion ac­knowl­edges that mit­i­gat­ing such a large amount of car­bon will be an “enor­mous tech­no­log­i­cal chal­lenge.” The cur­rent strat­e­gy to meet the man­date in­volves the use of Sus­tain­able Avi­a­tion Fu­el (SAF), in­vest­ment in new air­craft tech­nol­o­gy, in­fra­struc­ture im­prove­ment and car­bon cap­ture and stor­age tech­nol­o­gy.

Al­ready, the in­dus­try is fac­ing head­winds in the process of sourc­ing SAF. IA­TA is pro­ject­ing 1.9 mil­lion tonnes of SAF will be pro­duced by the end of 2025 - al­most dou­ble the amount pro­duced in 2024. How­ev­er, pro­duc­tion growth is pro­ject­ed to slow, reach­ing on­ly 2.4 mil­lion tonnes in 2026. IA­TA blames this on a lack of pol­i­cy sup­port.

“SAF pro­duc­tion growth fell short of ex­pec­ta­tions as poor­ly de­signed man­dates stalled mo­men­tum in the fledg­ling SAF in­dus­try. If the goal of SAF man­dates was to slow progress and in­crease prices, pol­i­cy­mak­ers knocked it out of the park,” said Willie Walsh, IA­TA’s di­rec­tor gen­er­al.

He added, “But if the ob­jec­tive is to in­crease SAF pro­duc­tion to fur­ther the de­car­bon­i­sa­tion of avi­a­tion, then they need to learn from fail­ure and work with the air­line in­dus­try to de­sign in­cen­tives that will work.”

Walsh is not afraid to call out gov­ern­ment poli­cies that do more harm than good to the 350+ air­lines that IA­TA rep­re­sents.

Just last week, Walsh called on gov­ern­ments to stop us­ing air­space as an eco­nom­ic and po­lit­i­cal weapon, call­ing it “in­ap­pro­pri­ate” and “un­ac­cept­able”.

Owens Thom­sen al­so told Guardian Me­dia, the eco­nom­ic cost of air­space clo­sures is an­ti­com­pet­i­tive.

“It dis­torts com­pe­ti­tion...the air­lines that might still be able to fly over re­strict­ed air­space, they ob­vi­ous­ly now have an ad­van­tage ver­sus those who can’t. And this is very much against what we re­al­ly need for a glob­al net­work in­dus­try such as ours. What we need is har­mon­i­sa­tion and every­body hav­ing ac­cess to the same con­di­tions and so on,” she said.

She not­ed that as soon as the au­thor­i­ties start pick­ing that sys­tem apart, the end re­sult is frag­men­ta­tion.

“And frag­men­ta­tion cas­cades in a glob­al net­work in­dus­try and sort of trav­els around the globe and then comes back and hits you again a sec­ond time. This will de­prive peo­ple of trav­el op­tions, and goods will come lat­er,” she added.