Investigating the feasibility of supporting climate-optimized flight planning with non-CO2 policies

Kurzfassung

Aviation’s climate impact is significantly influenced by non-CO2 effects, which depend not only on emission quantities but also factors such as emission location, time, and meteorological conditions. Climate-optimized flight trajectories have been shown to mitigate these effects efficiently but typically lead to higher operating costs due to changes in fuel consumption and flight time. As a result, economic constraints limit the implementation of climate-optimized flight planning. To address the trade-off between mitigation potential and cost changes, we investigate an extension of the European Emission Trading System (EU ETS) for aviation to include non-CO2 effects. We assess the suitability of such a policy scheme and analyze its sensitivity to routing, mitigation potential and cost changes while considering uncertainties in quantifying non-CO2 climate effects. For this purpose, we optimize representative intra-European routes assuming a CO2-equivalent (CO2e) based pricing of non-CO2 effects, applying DLR’s Trajectory Optimization Module for optimization and algorithmic climate change functions to determine the climate impact under various meteorological conditions. Preliminary results indicate that policy-driven flight planning can efficiently reduce aviation’s climate impact. Depending on selected climate metric, CO2e price and accounting scheme, we observe climate mitigation potentials of up to 60% per individual flight mission. If costs changes are directly passed on to passengers, ticket prices increase by 0.6 to 7.8%. Abatement costs range from 3 to 75 EUR per ton of CO2e depending on mission characteristics, which is well below the cost of alternative decarbonization methods like renewable energy sources or carbon capture and storage.