Airline regulator outlines plans for tougher 2020 emissions targets

The UN body that regulates global aviation has lent its backing to the industry's recent commitment to halve its carbon emissions by 2050, but has outlined plans for more demanding medium term targets than those set out by airlines.

A high level meeting of the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) concluded on Friday last week with an agreement to support industry action to cut carbon emissions. ICAO council president Roberto Kobeh González said: "The nations of the world that represent the vast majority of international civil aviation traffic have spoken and their commitment is clear.”

Last month, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) presented proposals to the UN that would commit the industry to halving emissions from the sector by 2050, improving fuel efficiency by 1.5 per cent annually to 2020, and ensuring emissions peak from the same date.

The ICAO welcomed the industry's commitment to tackling emissions, but recommended that fuel efficiency should be improved by two per cent annually to 2020 rather than 1.5 per cent.

It also rejected the IATA's target of ensuring emissions peak from 2020, suggesting that emission reduction targets should be replaced with a goal of delivering a further average annual fuel efficiency improvement of two per cent a year between 2021 and 2050.

Giovanni Bisignani, chief executive of IATA, said that although the regulator's short term targets were tougher than those proposed by the industry, the long term targets were less ambitious than those set out by the industry.

"It is ironic that the industry is setting tougher targets for itself than its regulators require," he said. "As a united industry, we remain committed to the ambitious environmental targets that we brought to this meeting."

Negotiations on the final legal binding targets to be adopted by the ICAO as part of any international climate change deal agreed at the Copenhagen Summit later this year will not continue. "The challenge is to work together to close this gap by the next ICAO Assembly in September 2010," said Bisignani.

He added that short-term targets to improve fuel efficiency by two per cent a year could only be met if they are accompanied by government-backed reforms to air traffic control regimes. "Setting such a target comes with responsibility," he said. "We can fly the plane efficiently, but governments must deliver improvements in air traffic management – NextGen in the US, for example. Governments must back their target with infrastructure investments to make it achievable."

There was also limited progress on industry recommendations for a global sectoral cap-and-trade scheme that would limit the market distortions threatened by regional schemes such as the European emissions trading scheme (ETS), with the ICAO committing only to establishing "the process to develop a framework for economic measures".

"We took a step in the right direction, toward a global sectoral approach, but there is still a lot of ground to cover," said Bisignani.