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A cleaner future for flight — aviation needs a radical redesign

Efficiency and clean fuels won’t be enough. Governments and industry must experiment with other approaches to bring the climate impact of aviation close to zero.
  1. Steffen Kallbekken

    1. Steffen Kallbekken is research director for the Climate Economics group at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research, Oslo, Norway.

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  2. David G. Victor

    1. David G. Victor is professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California, San Diego, professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, USA.

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Aviation is a big polluter. Globally, the industry generates roughly one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year — comparable to that produced by Japan, the world’s third-largest economy. Although many governments are regulating emissions from cars and trucks, such as by phasing out internal-combustion engines and switching to electric vehicles, air transportation is technologically rooted in old patterns. Apart from a pause during the COVID-19 pandemic, emissions from flights have risen by 2.5% each year for the past two decades. Over the next 30 years, the industry’s impact on global warming is set to exceed that of its whole history1, since the Wright brothers’ first flights in the early 1900s.

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Nature 609, 673-675 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02963-7

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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