A Note on How to Internalize Aviation's Climate Impact of non-CO2 Effects

Abstract

In the Paris Agreement 2015 (COP21, CMP11), the world's leaders have confirmed that there is a need for fundamental changes of existing patterns of production and consumption to mitigate global warming, which affects the livelihood of an increasing amount of people worldwide. Changes of these patterns involve significant economic costs, but polluters can refuse to pay their pollution costs adequately due to the absence of market prices for environmental public goods. In order to create financial incentives for pollution reduction, policy makers are paying closer attention to instruments of environmental economics. Within this study, the lack of incentivizing airlines to internalize their climate costs is tried to be closed by the introduction of climate-charged airspaces, as non-CO2 emissions have location- and time-dependent effects upon the climate. In order to create an incentive for airlines to minimize flight time and emissions in highly climate-sensitive regions, a climate charge should be imposed for operators of aircraft when flying through them. Cost-minimizing airlines are expected to re-route their flights to reduce their climate charges and hence cash operating costs. Accordingly, this leads to the desired outcome of incentivizing reduction of global warming and even driving technological innovation towards cleaner technologies. The evaluation of the climate impact mitigation potential of climate-charged airspaces is performed based on optimal control techniques. Climate sensitivities are expressed by climate change functions characterizing the climate impact caused by an emission at a certain location and time. The cost-benefit potential (climate impact mitigation vs. rise in operating costs) is investigated for an US-route and benchmarked against climate-optimized trajectories.