Private aviation is releasing more than its ‘fair share’ of emissions Premium
The Hindu
Aviation's environmental impact, private jets' high carbon footprint, and challenges in decarbonizing the industry explored in-depth.
If the aviation sector was a country, it would be among the world’s top 10 greenhouse-gas emitting nations. Air travel is one of the most polluting modes of travel for its relatively higher carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions and the effects of vapour trails and gases it deposits in the atmosphere.
But even within air travel, private jets and chartered planes have a higher carbon footprint per passenger. According to a 2021 report of the European Federation for Transport and Environment, private jets are five- to 14-times more polluting per passenger than commercial flights and 50-times more than trains.
A recent study in Nature reported emissions increased by 46% between 2019 and 2023 especially thanks to private aviation. The number of aircraft increased from 25,993 in December 2023 to 26,454 in February 2024, and is expected to grow further. According to the paper, “Private aviation contributed at least … about 3.6 tonnes CO2 per flight.”
As of March 2024, 112 private planes were registered in India. According to the paper, India has very few aircraft per lakh population (0.01) compared to Malta (46.51), the U.S. (5.45), Switzerland (3.76), the U.K. (0.78), Brazil (0.43), France (0.36), and Russia (0.1). China has a comparable 0.02.
“But India is actually among the top 20 countries in terms of private aircraft ownership and the highest among low-middle-income countries,” Ramya Natarajan, a research scientist at the Centre for Study of Science, Technology, and Policy (CSTEP), a think-tank in Bengaluru, said. “This isn’t surprising because India, while still a developing country, has the third highest number of billionaires in the world and also has a rapidly growing millionaire population.”
Despite nascent efforts to decarbonise the aviation industry, solutions like sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs), hydrogen, and electrification haven’t been easy to implement at a large scale.
In the study, researchers from institutes in Sweden, Germany, and Denmark analysed flight data from the ADS-B Exchange platform and focused on five recent global events accompanied by international travel.
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