From Carbon Brief
Data for 2018 shows the global population flying more frequently – and over longer distances than ever before – with nearly 38m scheduled flights, carrying 4.3bn passengers over a total of 54bn km. Aviation has been growing at around 5% per year before 2020.
But what is the climate cost of all these flights? The oft-quoted figure is that aviation accounts for around 2% of global CO2 emissions. Yet, the impact of aviation on the climate goes beyond just CO2 and its emissions have complicated interactions in the atmosphere that can reinforce the warming impact.
Aviation’s climate impacts have been studied for many years, including a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1999, but rarely are all the results pulled together to produce such a comprehensive analysis and assessment based on the best available science.
Published in the journal Atmospheric Environment, we – along with 19 other scientists around the world – recently produced an updated analysis of the present-day climate impacts of aviation.
We find that, when all its impacts are taken into account, aviation represents around 3.5% of the warming impact caused by humans in the present day.
Below, we unpack this headline result of the study and describe a little of the context.
[Read more here]
For simplicity, I will assume in future that the GHG emissions from aviation are ~4% of the total. Of course, as emissions from other sources fall, the percentage will increase.
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