The aviation industry is a particular challenge from a climate change perspective. On the one hand, rapid growth is giving an increasing number of people globally access to travel opportunities their parents never had. On the other hand, this same growth is set to catapult aviation from being a modest contributor to global warming to being one of the largest sectoral drivers of climate change. The aviation industry trajectory to reduced climate footprint is reliant on a dramatic expansion of aviation biofuel production to meet its goals – but use of biofuels in aviation remains limited, and there is no global regulatory framework to ensure that biofuels used in aviation deliver real emissions reductions. The aspiration to deliver 100% aviation fuel from alternative sources by 2050 is almost certainly unachievable, and the mechanisms to deliver accelerated deployment of aviation alternative fuels don’t exist yet.
We’re interested in how aspiration and reality can be brought together for the alternative aviation fuels industry, in frameworks to ensure that aviation biofuels deliver real carbon reductions, and in the relationship between the non-CO2 climate forcing impact of aviation and overall climate change mitigation.