By Marie Owens Thomsen, Senior Vice President, Sustainability & Chief Economist
Europe has been here before. In 2008, an EU Directive sought to extend its Emissions Trading System (ETS) to international aviation beyond European airspace. That triggered strong opposition from governments around the world. Until Europe backed away in 2012, this was among the most contentious disputes in international aviation.
It created a lot of acrimony, but what followed was profound. Governments were able to come together through the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and agree the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) in 2016. This was historic, the world's first sector-wide global market-based mechanism for addressing carbon emissions. Europe can take credit for its role in making that happen.
The lesson from 2012 was not that climate ambition should be scaled back. It was that the best results come from global solutions.
Air transport connects countries, economies, and communities every day. In that context, CORSIA—the agreed global solution—delivers certainty, consistency, and long-term stability. In adopting CORSIA, governments noted the superiority of a global solution compared to a patchwork of overlapping regional measures. Governments chose cooperation over fragmentation and produced one of the most significant achievements in aviation climate policy.
Last week, the European Commission proposed that the EU ETS should expand its “domestic” reach and encroach on CORSIA’s international remit. The proposal is for the EU ETS to cover all flights to destinations within 5,000km of Europe’s geographic center. Whatever the distance proposed, this is extraterritorial overreach, goes against the CORSIA agreement the Europeans themselves helped create, and it is as unacceptable today as it was in 2012.
The goals that we assume everybody is working towards are to deliver as much CO2 emissions reduction as possible, as fast as possible, and at the lowest possible cost. Fragmentation, duplication, and the constant moving of goalposts will not achieve those goals. If anybody should know that, it should be the EU, given that it has derived such great benefits from forming the union, creating a common currency, and harmonizing rules and regulations. It is difficult to understand why the EU would make plans that impede such benefits internationally.
IATA will continue to back the full implementation of CORSIA and to oppose all local and regional unilateral initiatives that undermine the very governance of global civil aviation. There is ample space for Europe to provide leadership in climate policies – they should just avoid leading with the bad policies.
