The new UN deal on aviation emissions leaves much to be desired

Emissions from international flights - a bugbear of efforts to combat climate change - will finally be regulated under a scheme agreed by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) on Thursday last week.

It’s a problem that had remained largely unaddressed by states – and airlines – since 1997, the year when essentially all nations, through the Kyoto Protocol, determined that ICAO – a United Nations agency – should deal with it.

Governments all took the view that, given jurisdictional and aircraft ownership and control issues, and the nature of the problem, ICAO was the appropriate forum to address the emissions problem. It was also a reflection of how difficult the problem was – and still is – to solve.

At the last ICAO Assembly, in 2013, states agreed that a market mechanism for international aviation was best, and that its form would be approved by the assembly this year. This 2013 agreement came just shy of 20 years since ICAO was tasked with addressing the problem. The 2016 meeting was the organisation’s 38th.

Read the piece on The Conversation by an associate professor, David Hodgkison, and Rebecca Johnson from the Faculty of Law, both from the University of Western Australia -“The new UN deal on aviation emissions leaves much to be desired.”