Flying in the face of facts

The last few months have been an exciting time for aviation policy. Following on from the Stern review, key statements about aviation have been made in the Eddington Review, the pre-Budget report, the aviation white paper progress report, the EU legislative proposal for including aviation within the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, and a House of Commons environmental audit committee report.

There have also been recent interviews with DEFRA minister for climate change and the environment, Ian Pearson, and the prime minister, Tony Blair. The inconsistencies and inadequacies of the government’s emerging approach are a serious cause for concern.

Published first, the Stern review highlighted the importance of climate change. It argued that ‘the costs of stabilising the climate are significant but manageable; delay would be dangerous and much more costly’, meaning that ‘prompt and strong action is clearly warranted’. It further argued that all countries would need to play their part, albeit that ‘countries facing diverse circumstances will use different approaches to make their contribution to tackling climate change’.

Aviation represents a particular challenge for the UK, as a fifth of international air passenger movements are made to or from UK airports, about two-thirds of these international movements are made by UK residents. Hence, whilst UK airlines may justifiably claim to be relatively efficient, in absolute terms, UK residents generate more emissions from aviation than residents in most other countries.

Although, in 2000, only about 6 per cent of UK CO2 emissions came from flying, aviation is one of the fastest growing sources of UK CO2 emissions. These emissions approximately doubled between 1990 and 2000 — a period when the UK CO2 emissions reported under the Kyoto protocol (which excludes international aviation and shipping) reduced. The government’s own forecasts suggest that, even using the most optimistic assumptions about improvements in technology, operations and air-traffic management, as well as relatively moderate forecasts about future passenger growth, emissions from aviation will grow significantly. By 2050, aviation could account for more than a quarter of the total CO2 emissions that the UK aims for as a whole.

Moreover, non-CO2 emissions from aviation significantly add to climate damage. According to a special report by the intergovernmental panel on climate change, the climate impact of aviation is ‘two to four times larger than the forcing by aircraft carbon dioxide alone’.

In contrast, for the sum of all other human activities, the climate impact is thought to be only one to one-and-a-half times larger than the CO2 effect. Taking the worst case scenario for aviation, if aviation’s impacts are four times as bad as its CO2, whereas, for other sectors, the CO2 emissions are a good proxy for overall impacts, then this would mean that by 2000, aviation was already responsible for about 20 per cent of the UK’s climate impacts.

Given the seriousness of the problem, environmental campaigners have long argued that policy-makers need to implement measures which will curb the growth in passenger numbers — including a proposed freeze on airport expansion and the imposition of new taxes or charges. There are various justifications for new taxes — to internalise environmental costs, to reduce the tax advantages that aviation enjoys compared to some other sectors and to raise prices in order to discourage the growth in new air trips. There have been a number of studies by respected economists suggesting that at least 40 per cent of the growth in air travel has been caused by the significant reductions in its real cost to passengers.

Campaigners have also seriously questioned the economic benefits for the UK that accrue from supporting aviation. More than 80 per cent of the new air traffic movements generated in the last 10 years have been for leisure purposes, mostly made by UK residents travelling abroad, and who on average spend more money overseas than foreign residents spend here. Specifically, for every pound spent by a foreign tourist here, a British resident is currently spending about £2.30 abroad. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has expressed strong concern about the growing tourism deficit, which was estimated to be about £17 billion in 2005.

Hence, whilst international action is clearly important, there are strong reasons why the UK may need to focus on aviation more than other countries, and the economic rationale for not taking unilateral action is, at best, unclear.

The current fad for ‘voluntary offsetting’ — where air travellers can choose to make payments to compensate for their activities — has raised a number of concerns. First, campaigners argue that this cannot be a substitute for taxes, since by definition such offsets do not encourage people to reconsider whether to make their trip at all. Secondly, any voluntary scheme is inherently unfair: why should some travellers pay for climate impact and not others?

Thirdly, the payments levied are often considered to be seriously inadequate, and relate to schemes where the carbon emissions from flying will be offset over time periods which are too long to be useful.

Finally, if the UK is serious about significantly curbing its own emissions, all existing long-term forecasts suggest that it will be impossible to generate enough savings in other sectors to offset aviation.

So what did post-Stern reports say about aviation policy, given the seriousness of concerns about climate change and UK aviation’s impact?

The Eddington Review was deeply disappointing. Whilst arguing that air travellers should pay the full environmental costs of their journey, it entirely failed to recognise that additional charges might be justified as a way of managing airport congestion and prioritising trips. This is particularly surprising since it advocated this policy for road transport. Meanwhile, it endorsed the 2003 aviation white paper’s policy of significant aviation expansion largely on economic grounds, failing to even mention the tourism deficit arguments.

Next, the 2006 pre-Budget report proposed a doubling of air passenger duty from February 2007. This is a welcome development, but perhaps sounds more substantial than it is.

On most economy fares to Europe, it will mean an additional charge of just £5, and a return to a level of taxation originally in place in 2001. (Note that, at the moment, the only tax paid to the UK government on an economy flight to many European countries is just £5 — any other ‘taxes and charges’ paid on a ticket are going to other organisations, notably the airport operators and the airlines themselves.) Whilst an extra fiver may have some effect on air travel demand, it hardly represents the ‘strong action’ Stern was calling for.

Next, the long awaited progress report on the 2003 aviation white paper was produced. On the positive side, this endorsed the rise in air passenger duty and committed the UK to promoting action at both EU and wider international level to tackle aviation emissions. It also proposed the introduction of a new emissions cost assessment tool for assessing significant increases in airport capacity, and restated a belief that ‘other economic instruments’ may be necessary to tackle aviation’s impacts.

However, much more negatively, it reiterated plans for a significant expansion in air trips, with increases in airport expansion to accommodate these. It failed to include any discussion of what ‘additional economic instruments’ might be, nor any recognition that the economic impacts of aviation might be anything other than entirely beneficial. Neither did it include any acknowledgement that encouraging people not to fly might be an environmentally important and cost-effective strategy worthy of consideration. It also put considerable emphasis on offset schemes, without discussing any of the potential limitations outlined above.

Also, just before Christmas, the legislative proposals for including aviation within the EU Emissions Trading Scheme were released. Action at EU level is undoubtedly vital. Including aviation within the emissions trading scheme could be a welcome step, and support for these proposals has been a central plank of the government’s stated strategy to tackle aviation’s climate impact.

However, it is notable that the proposals do not address non-CO2 emissions from aviation, and they will not come into force until 2011 for EU flights (and 2012 for all others). This is at least five years away. Meanwhile, there were 12.5 million new air passenger movements through UK airports last year alone. Similar levels of growth will mean major increases in emissions before trading ever begins — so relying on trading alone cannot be sufficient. In addition, commentators have a number of more general concerns about the operation and efficacy of the emissions trading scheme overall.

Some of the concerns described above have been highlighted in numerous reports by the House of Commons environmental audit committee. In particular, in its twelfth report, published late in 2006, it reiterated its concern about the Department for Transport’s ‘relative lack of prioritisation and sense of urgency in tackling climate change’ and continued to call for a ‘fundamental rethink’ of aviation policy. More recently, Ian Pearson, the DEFRA minister for climate change and the environment, has also argued that strong action on aviation is urgently needed on climate change grounds.

However, the latest comments by the prime minister indicate that there is little chance that such concerns will be addressed. In particular, Tony Blair apparently refuses to even consider discouraging aviation growth on the grounds that ‘it’s just not practical’, and seems to think that technology can solve all the problems: ‘What we need to do is to look at how you make air travel more energy efficient, how you develop the new fuels that will allow us to burn less energy and emit less.’

Yet his own government’s forecasts already show that such developments will be insufficient to counterbalance aviation growth, and measures like the introduction of alternative fuels are likely to take decades to become mainstream.

In short, then, the recent spate of reports and statements suggest a fundamental government failure to treat the climate impact of aviation with the seriousness it merits. If airport expansion goes ahead, according to the government’s own forecasts, emissions will increase even if industry implements every single impressive mitigation measure it is promising.

By primarily relying on future international measures, the government is failing to take the decisive action that its own reports suggest is needed now, in a sector in which the UK, in absolute terms, is one of the worst polluters in the world.

Meanwhile, the government’s rationale for considering that the emissions from aviation warrant less action than those from most other sectors, and its failure to consider aviation’s full economic impact, raises serious questions about the basis on which decisions are being made.

Dr Sally Cairns is a Senior Research Fellow, working jointly at the Transport Research Laboratory and University College London. Together with Carey Newson, she co-wrote the report ‘Predict and decide: Aviation, climate change and UK policy’, which was published in October 2006 by the Environmental Change Institute of Oxford University.

She can be contacted at scairns@trl.co.uk, 01344 770078. She wishes to gratefully acknowledge the contribution of Carey Newson to this article.