Can the aviation sector be sustainable using market based solutions alone?

The international aviation sector is responsible for 2% of all Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions (Terrenoire et al., 2019), this is increased to 4-5% when considering all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (Lee et al., 2010). This essay explores the primary mitigation strategy to reduce carbon emissions to meet the Paris Agreement of limiting global temperatures below 2°C (UNFCC, 2015) . The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO, 2016) announced the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) scheme to produce ‘carbon neutral’ operation from 2020 onwards employing the principle of carbon offsetting as the main mechanism.

The emergence of the CORSIA scheme is influenced by the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), adopted in the European Economic Area (EEA) in 2005, and covers 40% of the EU’s GHG emissions (EC, 2016). However, aviation was only included in 2012 for intra-EU flights (Larsson et al., 2019). Prior to this, aviation related emissions were governed by the Kyoto Protocol which mandated only domestic flights be reported through Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) (Dings, 2010), thus, limiting mitigation strategies to national contexts (Maertens et al., 2019). It was the EU’s proposal to widen ETS to further include flights outside of the EU that prompted ICAO to implement the CORSIA offset scheme (Larsson et al., 2019).