van Ewijk, Stijn;
Chaudhary, Shitiz;
Berrill, Peter;
(2023)
Estimating passenger emissions from airfares supports equitable climate action.
Environmental Research Letters
, 18
, Article 024013. 10.1088/1748-9326/acaa48.
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Abstract
Air travel generates a substantial and growing share of global greenhouse gas emissions. Reduction efforts partly rely on estimates of emissions per passenger, which may be used for carbon budgets, offsets, or taxes. Aircraft emissions are typically allocated to individual passengers through space-based allocation dependent on seating arrangements by travel class. However, the operation of aircraft depends on profitability, which benefits from high fares from late bookings, often by business and high-income travellers. Fare-based allocation recognises the economic drivers of airline emissions by allocating the aircraft emissions proportionally to the paid airfares. In this article, we compare space-based passenger emissions, which differ only by class, with fare-based passenger emissions, which depend on the fare paid by the individual traveller. We extract space-based allocation factors from widely used emission calculators and derive fare-based allocation factors from airfares for domestic travel in the US. We find that the space-based allocation factors reflect the difference in average expenditure by travel class but not the difference in expenditure between travellers. With fare-based accounting, the most expensive economy trips have similar emissions to space-based premium trips, while less expensive premium trips have similar emissions to space-based economy trips. We find that a tax on fare-based instead of space-based emissions leads to a more evenly distributed impact on low-fare and high-fare travellers whilst achieving the same reduction in airline revenues. We conclude that fare-based emissions accounting better reflects the drivers of airline emissions and supports more equitable climate action.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Estimating passenger emissions from airfares supports equitable climate action |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1088/1748-9326/acaa48 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/acaa48 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. |
| Keywords: | Science & Technology, Life Sciences & Biomedicine, Physical Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Sciences & Ecology, climate change, aviation, air travel, emissions accounting, carbon tax, AIR-TRAVEL, AVIATION, TAX, IMPACT |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Civil, Environ and Geomatic Eng |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10165274 |
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