Carbon footprint

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The aviation industry stands accused of being a major contributor to the global warming crisis.

Global warming is the biggest threat to the planet today, according to environmental experts and campaigners. A world-wide crisis that requires a man-made solution.

Essentially the planet is heating up as a direct result of gases produced from vehicles, power plants, deforestation, and other sources, all of which are building up in the atmosphere, acting like a thick blanket over our planet.

Because of this, during the 20th century the impact of our daily lives has resulted in an increase of around one degree Fahrenheit on average global temperatures and aviation has played its part.

On a fundamental level international aviation contributes to climate change through different aircraft emissions, such as carbon dioxide, water vapour emissions, contrails or indirectly through nitrogen oxides.

Add to this the fact that planes fly in the upper atmosphere where the effects of carbon pollution are increased three-fold. To put this into perspective; one short haul flight produces roughly the same amount of global warming gas as would be produced by driving a 1.4 litre car around for three months.

Despite efforts from the airline industry to improve aircraft technology and efficiency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), it has not been sufficient to compensate for the rapid growth of global air traffic which has increased by around 50% in the last decade.

Obviously the increase in air traffic has led to a rise in the amount of fuel consumed and since 1990, carbon emissions from aviation have increased by 87% - accounting for around 3.5% of the total human contribution to climate change.

In view of this, the global Carbon Trading scheme was set up in 1988 to give each country the choice between paying to cover the costs of their emissions or paying someone else to cut their pollution.

Carbon trading sets a cap on emissions from the whole economy, and individual firms are given allowances of permitted emissions. If they exceed their allowance, they must cut their level or buy extra allowances from other organisations which aren't using their allocated levels.

However, due to the rapid growth in air traffic the 2005 the Kayoto Treaty was introduced, which stipulated that industrialised countries would have to cut their emissions from their 1990 levels by 5.2 per cent between 2008 and 2012.

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