Growth over Climate? Aviation and the Paris Agreement

Aviation is one of the most challenging sectors in terms of its climate impact. While technologies for decarbonising the sector are being developed, they remain either technologically immature, suitable for only a limited range of cases, and/or unavailable on larger scale, at least in the decade to come. How are the limitations of technological solutions to reducing aviation emissions recognised in key transport strategy documents? In this work, this question is examined empirically for both the European Union and Finland by analysing EU’s Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy and Finland’s Government resolution on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from aviation. The findings indicate that these strategies are strongly focused on technological solutions to the detriment of demand management, thus inverting the avoid–shift–improve hierarchy of emission reduction. Mode shift and demand reduction are only explored covertly. Though the policy documents refer to the Paris Agreement, the creation of emission reduction targets covering international aviation is not proposed while at least the Finnish document acknowledges the shortcomings of current schemes (ICAO’s CORSIA). The documents also fail to underline that the proposed technological solutions are unlikely to reduce aviation emissions significantly in the medium term (by the 2030s). These shortcomings are however recognised in other more technical reports (notably the European Aviation Environmental Reports), though the implications in terms of respecting the Paris Agreement are not spelled out. This means the climate impact of aviation is likely to continue unabated, which only increases the pressure to reduce emissions in other sectors.