Assessing aviation’s climate impact, one journey at a time
“For the first time, a large European scientific and operational consensus will be proposed to address non-CO2 mitigation with concrete solutions.”
Over the past decade, efforts have been made to detect and avoid the conditions that generate contrails, as well as reducing other non-CO2 effects of air traffic. The CICONIA project, funded through the SESAR JU, aims to go further by improving European knowledge about the environmental impacts of air traffic. The project aims to accurately describe, measure and forecast these effects, and integrate this information into climate-efficient route planning. To achieve this, the CICONIA project will involve a broad spectrum of the European aviation industry, including airlines, air traffic management and network managers. The project will develop operational strategies and provide recommendations to regulatory bodies for sustainable aviation. The first step is to improve weather forecasting capabilities, including conditions that give rise to contrails, and generate more accurate and tailored climate impact assessments. “CICONIA will combine emission data on an individual flight basis with operational weather forecasts in order to compute the expected climate impact with dedicated tools,” explains Philippe Masson, air traffic management and rulemaking at Airbus and CICONIA project coordinator.
Concrete solutions
The CICONIA team will then define new Concepts of Operations (ConOps) guidelines for European air travel, including contrail avoidance. This will provide policymakers with recommendations and integrate climate metrics, economics and impact on operations. “Among the various mitigation approaches currently proposed, the use of sustainable aviation fuels appears as a promising solution to reduce CO2 emissions and some direct non-CO2 emissions,” adds Masson. The operational feasibility of the ConOps will then be demonstrated through simulations, and also with some real-world flight trials. The findings will help demonstrate how the generation of persistent and high-impact contrails can be minimised – this can be applied during both the flight planning stage and the journey itself. CICONIA, through its concrete recommendations and requirements, aims to mitigate aviation’s contribution to total anthropogenic climate warming, currently estimated to be around 3.5 %. “For the first time, a large European scientific and operational consensus will be proposed to address non-CO2 mitigation with concrete solutions,” says Masson.
Keywords
aviation, SESAR JU, sustainability, carbon neutrality, air traffic management, ATM, Green Deal, environmental impact, Horizon Europe, Digital European Sky, emissions, reduction