International aviation and shipping in a world below 2°C

Speaker: Olivier Dessens, Senior Research Associate, Bartlett School Environment, Energy & Resources, University College London
Moderator: Eduardo Müller Casseres, Energy Planning Program, COPPE, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract:
Aviation and shipping each account for only about 2 to 3% of the global total greenhouse gas emissions but over the last decades they exhibited the fastest growing sources of emissions. This is mainly due to record growth in demand driven by increasing passenger number and freight volume.
Moreover, international shipping and aviation were excluded from the Paris Agreement’s national accounting. Instead, responsibility for dealing with the sectors emissions has been delegated to specialist UN agency – the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and the International Maritime Organisation (IMO).
The ICAO has adopted an aspirational goal of ‘Carbon Neutral Growth from 2020’ for international aviation, this is to be achieved through a basket of measures, including the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA). The IMO has adopted an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from ships by at least 50% by 2050 compared to 2008 levels. However, the role of both sectors in a world of deep decarbonisation is still relatively unclear.
We first discuss available policies and technologies for reducing the emissions of international transport (technological or operational efficiency improvements, use of alternative fuels, demand shift and market-based incentives).
We then present the results of six global IAMs with different structures and modelling dynamics under the same economic assumptions and carbon budgets focussing on international aviation and shipping emissions. These scenarios have been developed within the NAVIGATE project to achieve below 2oC. The scenarios developed are not considering the respective ICAO and IMO policies and goals as our aim is to compare the modelling results to these targets.