The risks that climate change poses to aviation

Everyone in aviation understands the pressing need to decarbonise. We’ve made a lot of progress, but there’s a huge amount still to do –electric, hybrid or hydrogen aircraft, massive sustainable aviation fuel uptake – before that can happen. But aviation is an essential sector to society, to prosperity, to connectivity. And we too are set to be massively impacted over the decades ahead, which is where this study comes in. It explicitly analyses the risks that climate change triggered by man-made emissions poses to European aviation. It details how this will progressively impact flight operations, airport capacity as a result of sea level rise, flight times, choice of destination by tourists and fuel burn.

Provisional data indicate that average en-route ATFM delay for a flight delayed by a major storm will increase from 17-18 minutes per flight today, to 21-22 minutes by 2050. While storms are currently responsible for up to 7.5% of total en-route ATFM delays at network level, the trend is increasing. Initial estimates suggest that horizontal flight inefficiency could increase from 3.5% to 4.0-4.2% by 2050 due to major storms. For an aircraft flying 1,000 nautical miles, this would add 40 to 42 nautical miles to the journey. Already in 2019, over 1 million km were flown as a result of avoiding a major storm. This roughly corresponds to over 6,000t of extra fuel consumed, or over 19,000t of CO₂ produced.

Concretely, this means 178 coastal and low-lying airports could be affected. Assuming a one-day closure at an airport due to full flooding, the cost of diverted and cancelled flights are estimated at around €3 million for medium airports and €18 million for large airports. We are working closely with our Member States and all partners in aviation to identify and to implement appropriate adaptation responses.

The full report will be published after the summer, so watch out for it!