✈️ People LOVE flying. And that is not going to change ✈️

📈 Aviation already accounts for almost 1Gt or 2.5% of global CO2 emissions. The shocking reality: this number will go up, and up, and up. The sector has been growing steadily at 3-4%.

🤯 As countries develop, more people want to fly: from 2b journeys today to 10b by 2050, with emissions more than doubling to over 2Gt by 2050.

⚡ To make things worse, aviation is incredibly difficult to decarbonise. Electric planes are simply not an option for long-haul travel.

✅ Yet aviation is the only heavy-polluting industry which has a collective, global net-zero target for 2050. According to IATA the plan is to achieve this by primarily focusing on sustainable aviation fuels (hashtag#SAF) to do around 65% of the job. Technology innovations will reduce a further 13%, and infrastructure optimisation 3%.

🌲 The rest, or 19%, then falls to carbon offsets. As such, aviation is the only industry I am aware of that has already recognised that its very existence depends on the ability to offset its residual emissions, which are estimated at 200Mt-950Mt in 2050.

👎 In 2016, the UN launched the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (hashtag#CORSIA) specifically for this purpose. You could say it is the only global compliance market for carbon offsets. The challenge: its credits suck… Think questionable avoided deforestation.

🌍 As a result, national (UK) and geographical (EU) emission trading systems (hashtag#ETS) - which also cover aviation for domestic flights - are currently evaluating whether to support CORSIA or whether to extend their reach to international flights arriving/departing on their territory.

💚 This decision will have profound consequences for aviation and - potentially soon - for carbon removals. CORSIA could also level up, get rid of its low-quality credits, and allow durable CDR only. This might save CORSIA from the ETS takeover, and could provide CDR with its first large compliance use case.

📆 As you can tell, there are a lot of interesting angles to this discussion. If you want to dig deeper, join us for the next CDR Policy Scoop on Thursday 13th of March at 6pm CET, where Eve Tamme and I will unpack this challenging topic: https://lnkd.in/dhNSscnc

⁉️ Finally, what are your thoughts on the future of aviation and its decarbonisation? And to my aviation experts: anything I misrepresented or you would like to add?

➡️ Disclosure: I personally wish that people just flew less, and it is something I have been doing quite rigorously over the last years. It just seems like a naive wish in light of the data mentioned above. We need to assume aviation will continue to grow, and manage its consequences.

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