CORSIA — the "Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation" (Fly green)

 CORSIA: World's biggest plan to make flying green 'too broken to fix'

A new UN-brokered deal for aviation will not require airlines to offset flight emissions for another six years and will cost them less than 1% of operating costs by 2035.

When Austrian judges let Vienna Airport build a third runway in 2018 — overruling a lower court that had previously blocked the expansion on environmental grounds — international climate agreements did not stand in their way. World leaders had not pledged to limit air traffic, the airport argued, but rather to grow it in a "climate-neutral" way. The scheme they cited might not achieve even that.

CORSIA, the flagship emissions deal that launched this month, was brokered by the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to stop the sector's net greenhouse gas emissions from rising. But instead of tackling the growing number of flights between countries or capping their emissions, it forces airlines to buy credits that offset the rise in CO2 output above 2019 levels. Climate activists and some researchers say the scheme is unambitious, ineffective and could even harm efforts to cut emissions, which plunged last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The baseline above which offsets must be paid is so high that it will take until 2026 before any airline has to purchase one.

"CORSIA is a wreck that is too broken to fix," said Magdalena Heuwieser, co-founder of the Stay Grounded activist group, who protested the new runway at Vienna Airport. "It is even worse than doing nothing because it distracts from real solutions." Using offsets as a "safety valve" can delay investments in the technologies needed to decarbonize flights, said Dan Rutherford of the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), an environmental research group, who provided emissions forecasts for the DW analysis. "We're starting to see fuel providers and airlines make this same argument."

The water vapour from airplanes adds to the heating effect from CO2

CORSIA — the "Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation" — is the world's biggest attempt to make flying green. Planes are responsible for about 2.5% of carbon dioxide emissions and release other gases and water vapour that, at high altitudes, heat the planet even more. The idea behind the scheme is to let the world reap the benefits of global travel and tourism without hurting the planet more than it currently does. 

Flying is one of the top sources of emissions for people in rich countries, along with driving cars and eating meat, and is projected to boom as incomes rise, particularly across Asia. But unlike similarly polluting activities, the technology for clean flying does not yet exist. There are no airline equivalents of Tesla and Oatly, which make electric cars and plant-based milks. Trains cannot satisfy the demand to cross continents and oceans. Instead, the ICAO — the UN body responsible for international flight emissions — is banking on the CORSIA scheme, along with low-carbon fuels and innovations in plane design and air traffic management, to keep net emissions stable as the sector grows.

The objective of CORSIA is to complement these emissions reductions, "some of which are already happening," an ICAO spokesperson said. The amount of offsetting that is required depends on "how quickly and effectively progress can be achieved on one hand, and how quickly global air connectivity recovers on the other."

How does CORSIA offset CO2 emissions?

At its simplest, CORSIA means that airlines must buy credits to offset the emissions from their flights. These offsets are used to fund climate-friendly projects like planting trees and building solar panels, often in Asia, Africa and South America. The scheme, which is currently voluntary, will apply to all ICAO member states after 2027. It does not make airlines offset emissions from domestic flights, which make up a third of aviation emissions but fall outside the ICAO's remit, or include the owners of private jets. Some states with little air travel are also exempt.

Offsets are a popular tool to show progress toward net-zero emissions targets because they are cheap and let those who buy them continue polluting. But they often fail to live up to their promises. A study for the European Commission in 2016 found that 85% of the projects in the Clean Development Mechanism, one of the main offset programs approved by CORSIA, were overestimating the greenhouse gas emissions they saved. A 2019 investigation by the US investigative journalism outlet ProPublica uncovered projects in Cambodia where forests protected by carbon offset schemes had, in fact, been chopped down.

If an airline were to plant 100 acres of forest that were later burned by a wildfire, then "boom, all that carbon that's been offset, that's been paid for, is gone," said Ryan Katz-Rosene, a political scientist at the University of Ottawa, in Canada, who researches environmental policy. "Empirically, they [offsets] don't seem to hold water, at least most of the time."

A report by the New Climate Institute for the German Environment Agency in 2019 found that more than 80% of potential offset projects in four programs used by CORSIA were overstating their impact because they would have taken place whether the credits were sold or not. The ICAO later limited its eligible projects for the pilot phase to exclude those that started crediting before 2016. It also rejected several applications from offset programs that did not meet the standards of its technical advisers.

"While they may offer customers some peace of mind, traditional carbon offsets do almost nothing to tackle the emissions from flying," said United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, in a LinkedIn post in December pledging to fully cut the company's greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. "And, more importantly, they simply don't meet the scale of this global challenge."

 

Reference: dw.com