Even 'net zero' aviation could still cause significant global warming

The author is Adam Vaughan.

If efforts to achieve net-zero aviation fail to account for the warming effect of clouds created by planes, future flights will endanger the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

The Jet Zero Strategy was announced by the UK government on July 19th with a goal of reducing carbon emissions from flights to net zero by the year 2050.

The aviation sector could increase global average temperatures by between 0.1 and 0.4C even if carbon emissions are reduced.

The only emissions currently counted by international and most national efforts to decarbonise aviation are the ways flights heat the atmosphere. The non-CO 2 effects include the soot, aerosols and water Vapor released by aircraft engines.

The efforts needed to get aviation to a compatible place are enormous.

Future scenarios of demand for flights, technologies to power them and how much CO 2 would need to be removed from the atmosphere by trees or machines were explored by her team. Without a strong reduction in demand and a rapid switch to clean technologies, we would need to deploy carbon removal to a very large extent.

Most policy-makers would ignore 90 per cent of future flights' contribution to climate change if they failed to account for aviation's non-CO 2 effects.

The study makes a compelling case for focusing on climate-neutral aviation instead of carbon-neutral aviation. I think it's time for a change of direction.

According to the study, new fuels and flight technologies, from hydrogen to batteries, will need to be deployed quickly to reach climate neutrality.

It suggests that the aviation sector's plan for reducing its impact on climate change won't be enough.

With only a moderate increase in demand for flights, the status quo of jet fuel and offsetting would require an area the size of Germany to be planted with trees. She says that the amount of CO 2 removal may not be feasible.

It's not viable to continue flying with passenger jet fuels and offsetting carbon removal She says that the results show how difficult it will be to meet that new goal.

Nature Climate Change was published in the journal.