Efforts to make flying greener mostly count carbon dioxide emissions only, an approach that might ignore 90 per cent of future flights’ contribution to climate change accounting to new findings.
The research, published in Nature just days after the UK government announced its target of reducing carbon emissions from flights to net zero by 2050, warns that many strategies devised to decarbonise the aviation sector have significant blind spots.
Currently, the only emissions counted by international and most national efforts to decarbonise aviation are those related to the use of jet fuel. In doing so, these standards fail to account for soot, aerosols and water vapour released by aircraft engines.
Nicoletta Brazzola's team at ETH Zurich in Switzerland found that, despite these net-zero strategies, the aviation sector worldwide could increase global average temperatures by between 0.1°C and 0.4°C, putting at risk the Paris agreement of holding global...