The next big event on the environmental Agenda is the UN’s climate change Summit in Copenhagen in December. Since tackling aviation is high on the Summit’s priorities, the aviation world has been working frantically to get ICAO to agree on a set of high level emission goals to be put forward at the conference. For a time it looked like all efforts to the contrary, ICAO might go to the meeting with precious little to say. This would have been a total disaster because in the ensuing vacuum interests not exactly big fans of aviation would have tried to dictate the terms with regional differences and other spice added for good measure.
This danger is now past, the ICAO agreement is not only there, but it is more or less what the airspace user community and other partners in the industry wanted. IATA was key in shaping the industry position and also in advocating it in the ICAO machinery.
In the end, the industry found itself in the rare position of being praised by the Secretary General of the UN who said that aviation’s targets could be set as examples for other industries to follow.
The aviation strategy calls for the targets to be set on the international level and this was fully endorsed by ICAO. The differences are in the details but overall, everyone agreed that the airspace users got a good deal and the ICAO endorsement certainly lays the basis for a manageable future.
One curious bit is the difference between the per year fuel efficiency improvement target which ICAO has set at 2 % as opposed to the airspace user proposed target of 1.5 % through 2020.
What many experts regret is the fact that a proposal saying that States themselves had an important role in ensuring that the 0.5 % difference between the airspace user target and the ICAO target is closed through improved air traffic management was not retained.
This is strange because the same States fall over each other to prove how environmentally sensitive they are and because the (same??) governments have SESAR, the huge air traffic management improvement project in Europe, that is set to deliver efficiencies that are in fact higher in themselves than the 0.5 % per annum mismatch.
Perhaps governments should not be afraid to admit that they too have a role to play in this. Especially since SESAR is there already to do it for them.