So how the aviation industry is responding to climate change?

ACARE, the Advisory Council for Aeronautics in Europe, has published two papers on the future of the aeronautic industry and, among other issues, it discusses how it will tackle climate change.

The report with the vision for 2050 predicts that the global volume of traffic for aviation, due to population and economic growth will increase from 2.5 billion passengers in 2011 to around 16 billion passengers annually. That is a 6.4 times increase!

With regards to climate change, they predict that in 2050 technologies and procedures available will allow a 75% reduction in CO2 emissions per passenger kilometre.

So what’s the bottom line, assuming that passengers fly the same numbers of kms (which is  extremely optimistic)? Almost doubling the CO2 emissions!!!! (from the 2.5b passengers to emissions equivalent to today’s 4b passengers)

That tells us that we can do two things. Assume that aviation is a growing sector and being cool with that because it gives us so much freedom (and therefore making cuts in other sectors) or designing policies to cut demand for aviation (are we ready to give up flying?).

If you want to see how the aviation sector will look like in 2020, please download this other report here