Atmos. Environ. 45, 7036–7045 (2011)
The reduction targets agreed under the Kyoto Protocol omitted emissions from international air transport because they were too difficult to quantify. Reliable plane fuel data are hard to come by and, as they are commercially sensitive, government agencies are forced to use rough proxies such as fuel sales statistics. However, a group from the University of Otago in New Zealand hopes to change this. They present a method of estimating the carbon output of the aviation sector, country by country.
Oliver Howitt and colleagues first worked out carbon dioxide emission factors for aircraft based on data for the amount of fuel taken onboard individual planes that departed Auckland, New Zealand in 2007. These were 0.82 and 0.69 kg of carbon dioxide per tonne-km for short-haul and long-haul journeys, respectively.
They used these emission factors along with mass and distance travelled of international air freight to estimate the carbon dioxide emissions. In 2007, they report, air freight transported in and out of New Zealand emitted 1.2 Mt of carbon dioxide (compared with 4.3 Mt generated by international air-passenger transport).
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Petherick, A. Accounting for air freight. Nature Clim Change 1, 442 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1312
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1312
