Abstract
From 2021, an increasing percentage of the carbon emission growth in international air transport will be subject to offsetting under the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA). Presently, it is still unclear if, and how, the existing EU emissions trading scheme (ETS) for aviation will continue. We assess the environmental impacts of different options (not) to continue with the EU ETS for aviation alongside CORSIA, and also discuss resulting monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) requirements. Our results indicate that any form of continuation of the EU ETS would have positive environmental effects especially in the early 2020s, when the coverage and environmental impact of CORSIA, which only tackles any post-2020 emission growth in international aviation, will still be low. If, moreover, a certain failure of CORSIA Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) to actually achieve emission reduction elsewhere is assumed, the environmental net benefit of CORSIA will be even lower. From both the policy and economic perspectives, these aspects may further strengthen the need to continue with the EU ETS for aviation. Possible options are to maintain the EU ETS in operation for domestic flights only, as a complement to CORSIA, or to keep it alive even for international flights within the European Economic Area (EEA), replacing CORSIA there as an equivalent measure. Another option to increase the environmental effectiveness of CORSIA, at least to some extent, could be to voluntarily extend it to domestic EEA flights. Administrative-wise, the CORSIA MRV system could be applied to a continued EU ETS to reduce transaction costs and to assure globally similar or even identical MRV standards, e.g., with regard to exemptions and eligible fuel monitoring methods.
Highlights
In 1992, civil aviation represented some 2% of total anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, or about 13% of all transport-related CO2 emissions [1]
As well as for the continuation of the intra-Economic Area (EEA) EU emissions trading scheme (ETS) alone as reference, we first show in Figure 3 and Table 5 the expected share of annual global CO2 air transport emissions subject to emission trading or offsetting, i.e., for which either offsets (CORSIA) or EUA (EU ETS) will have to be purchased and surrendered
Option 1 - CORSIA as planned / Stop of EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) Option 3 - CORSIA extended to intra-EEA domestic Ref - EU ETS Reduced Scope
Summary
In 1992, civil aviation (hereinafter referred to as air transport) represented some 2% of total anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, or about 13% of all transport-related CO2 emissions [1]. The carbon credits which will be accepted for compliance shall arise from emission reduction mechanisms (such as UNFCCC’s Clean Development Mechanisms CDM), programs, or projects which, in return, are supposed to deliver measurable reductions in emissions [18]. This way, ICAO aims at freezing international aviation’s net CO2 emissions at 2020 levels, while the other emissions reduction measures like new technologies, the use of alternative fuels, or operational and infrastructural improvements shall be further pursued. Operational and infrastructural improvements are not unlikely to generate traffic growth, though, which may even increase the need for an effective market-based measure
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