The impact of climate change and weather on air transport in the UAE: Reduction of CO<inf>2</inf> emissions

Abstract

Worldwide aviation is expected to grow by just under 5% per year for the next two decades. This growth will have environmental consequences via noise, air quality and climate impacts. Potential mitigation methods include regulations and standards, technological improvements involving aircraft and engine performance and/or the development of alternative fuels, operational improvements, and market based policies. Climate change may have several consequences for transport demand on a global and regional scale. Especially the predicted increases in temperature could have substantial effects on aircraft performance and the associated patterns in passenger transport. In the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations' scientific body on the issue, stated with high certainty that human causes lay behind most of the observed global temperature increases. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased from approximately 280 ppm (parts per million) in the pre-industrial age to around 430 ppm today. At the level of 550 ppm, which could be reached as early as 2035, global average temperatures may rise by more than 2°C. Under a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario, the stock of greenhouse gases could more than triple by the end of the century, giving at least a 50% risk of temperatures rising by more than 5°C during the decades to follow. The scale of such an increase could be illustrated by the fact that the climate is presently 5°C warmer than in the last ice age, which was over 10,000 years ago. In 2009, the aviation industry set itself three ambitious climate goals. To achieve one of the goals such as to cap net aviation CO 2 emissions at 2020 levels, a global market based measure (MBM) has been developed. In addition to CO 2 emissions, aviation operations may influence climate via emissions of non CO2 gases and soot and sulfate particles which alter the atmospheric concentration of GHGs. Although some additional effects contribute to warming and others to cooling, non-CO2 effects are believed to contribute to warming in aggregate (Penner et al., 1999; Lee et al., 2009). Aviation climate impacts from non-CO2 sources are sometimes characterized by a metric — known as a multiplier — that divides the total impact of aviation on climate by the CO2 impact. Although proposals requiring airlines to purchase allowances for non-CO2 effects have been discussed in policy circles, such as the European Parliament, it remains uncertain whether such measures will be applied. To capture these uncertainties, we consider multiplier coefficients of one and two. When the multiplier is one, non-CO2 effects are not considered, while a multiplier of two is used to capture non-CO2 effects in our analysis. We refer to simulations employing a multiplier of one as “no aviation multiplier” scenarios and simulations with a multiplier of two as “aviation multiplier” scenarios. To reflect the increased scarcity of allowances in multiplier scenarios, we reduce economy-wide emissions caps based on estimates of the contribution of aviation to aggregate GHG emissions from Lee et al. (2009). To consider alternative offset and multiplier combinations, we consider four scenarios: full offsets with no aviation multiplier (F1), full offsets with an aviation multiplier (F2), medium offsets with no aviation multiplier (M1), and medium offsets with an aviation multiplier (M2). These scenarios capture a wide range of possible outcomes. The cap on cumulative emissions between 2012 and 2050 is 17% lower in full offset scenarios than in medium offset scenarios, and policy-induced aviation fuel price increases in multiplier scenarios are more than twice as large as fuel price increases in no multiplier scenarios. According to the Ministry of Energy announcement, the UAE released 199.65 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in 2013. The purpose of this paper is to investigate, according to the increase foreseen in air transportation in the UAE, the CO2 emissions within Abu Dhabi airport and in the UAE in order to propose solutions to reduce as much as possible those types of emissions. Data sampling, calculation of aviation emissions, uncertainty in data and type of fuel are critical issues considering thousands of flights to be taken into account.