International flights to be exempted from mandatory contrails reporting

EU law will require airlines to report their non-CO2 emissions, such as sulfur dioxide, water, and soot from January 2025. But a public consultation by the European Commission that closed on Monday (29 July) signalled that flights to and from non-EU destinations will be exempted.

Efforts to limit aviation’s climate impact have to date focused on aircraft’s CO2 emissions. In 2012 the EU brought aviation into its Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), which sets limits on CO2 emissions and puts a price on every ton of emitted CO2.

However, non-CO2 emissions – most visibly the long lines of clouds behind aircraft known as contrails – can have a warming impact which is at least as significant, and these are now firmly in policymaker’s sights.

Under EU legislation,  a monitoring, and reporting framework (MRV) for non-CO2 aviation emissions needs to be adopted by 31 August 2024. This is widely seen as a first step, before non-CO2 emissions are fully brought into the EU ETS and are subject to a cap.

However, according to the draft proposal put out to public consultation  by the European Commission,  international flights between the European Economic Area (EEA – the EU plus Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein) and non-EEA destinations will be exempted from mandatory reporting in the first two years.

“This represents a mere 33% of Europe’s aviation-related contrail impact. This decision is contrary to the EU ETS agreement adopted by EU lawmakers in 2022” said the green NGO Transport & Environment.

In its response to the public consultation, the Danish government said that “long-haul flights account for the largest non-CO2-aviation effects due to the flight altitude“ and that “excluding the most polluting flights means leaving out the most relevant data”.

Denmark’s submission also said that “the reduced scope in 2025-26 is not in in line with the ETS Directive”.

Airlines are split on the issue.

The European Regions Airline Association (ERA) wrote that “we see a paradox in the proposed MRV scope, where most data collection would fall onto short- and medium-haul flights, including regional airlines, despite the fact that non-CO2 effects are known to be far less significant for these type of operations”.

But rather than requiring international flights to report non-CO2 emissions, ERA instead argued that “every airline should be able to file exemptions  (…) for a transition period of two years”.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) strongly supports the exemption for international flights, and sent a letter to the Commission on the matter on 5 April.

“We oppose mandatory and extra-territorial requirements to collect data for policy-making purposes,” Willie Walsh,  IATA’s Director General, said in a 10 July blog post.

Walsh added that any expansion of the scope to extra-EU flights “could raise legal concerns regarding extraterritorial effects”.

Repeated exemptions for international flights

When the aviation sector’s CO2 emissions were included in the EU ETS in 2012, the rules initially applied to all flights, including international flights that departed or arrived at airports outside of Europe.

Amid a strong international backlash and trade threats, the EU temporarily restricted the scope of the EU ETS to intra-EEA flights. This temporary exclusion for extra-EEA flights was extended  and international flights are now set to remain excluded until 2027.

“Even if the EP (European Parliament) first reading asked to extend the ETS to the outgoing flights from the EU and eventually extend it to the original ETS scope (all international flights), the final agreement with the Council was different,” Jan-Christoph Oetjen, who negotiated the European Parliament’s opinion on the last revision of the ETS for aviation, told Euractiv.

Next steps

A Commission spokesperson said that after the feedback period the Commission will “assess and present the feedback to member states in the Climate Change Committee”.

A qualified majority vote by national governments is needed before the Commission can formally adopt it. The legal deadline for adoption is 31 August 2024.

[Edited by Donagh Cagney/Zoran Radosavljevic]

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