Assessing climate effects resulting from airspace closures following the Ukrainian crisis

Kurzfassung

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 significantly influenced international aviation due to a general closure of Ukrainian airspaces and a ban of overflights for Russian airspaces from sanctions applicable for a large set of Western countries. The resulting re-routing of flights leads to significant detours which does not only influence travel time and fuel consumption, but also emission quantities and climate impact. As the climate impact of aviation is not only influenced by CO2 emissions, but also by non-CO2 effects (e.g. NOx , H2O and contrail cirrus), the resulting climate impact significantly varies with location and time of emissions. Consequently, especially changes in emission locations are expected to lead to changes in climate impact besides rise in emission quantities resulting from additional detours. The impact from closed Ukrainian and Russian airspace following the Russian invasion on the global air transport system has been subject to previous research. Existing studies show a significant impact on the air transport system through re-routing and cancelling of flights as well as an increase in flight distance, fuel consumption and CO2 effects for the investigated re-routed flights. Nevertheless, a detailed investigation of the climate impact considering both emission quantity and location changes has not yet been performed. Furthermore, a detailed trajectory assessment has so far been focused on selected flight missions only. Therefore, this paper based on a master’s thesis by Kumpa analyses a large sample of flights crossing the Ukrainian or Russian airspace pre-conflict (pre invasion) and compares the trajectories including relevant mission characteristics such as fuel burn, travel time, and emission quantities to the results after the Russian invasion (post invasion). In addition to trajectory and emission assessments, we investigate climate effects considering both changes in emission quantities as well as location changes due to re-routings.