Building on the EUROCONTROL Aviation Long-Term Outlook to 2050, which anticipates the development of both traffic and emissions for all ECAC flights, the EAER focuses on flights at EU27+EFTA1 airports. It looks at the historic and future scenarios of air traffic and its associated noise and emissions. It also summarises the latest scientific understanding of these impacts before focusing on six main impact mitigation areas (Technology and Design; Air Traffic Management and Operations; Airports; Sustainable Aviation Fuels; Market-Based Measures and International Cooperation) and comes with recommendations on reducing climate change, noise and air quality impacts from aviation and accelerating action to adapt the sector to the impacts of climate change.
While the number of flights at EU27+EFTA airports recovered to 8.35 million in 2023, which is still 10% below the pre-pandemic levels, longer-term trends suggest that the region will be home to some 11.8 million annual flights by 2050 in the base scenario (9.4 million in the low scenario and 13.8 million in the high scenario).
More fuel-efficient technology, optimisation of operations and use of Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) following the implementation of the recent ReFuelEU Aviation Regulation should decouple traffic growth from emissions, which are projected to be reduced in most scenarios. These scenarios also highlight the need for additional market-based measures (e.g. ETS, CORSIA) to achieve net-zero CO2 emissions by mid-century. Further measures are also needed to address other sources of pollution from aviation including noise and emissions of air pollutants such as ultrafine particulates, which result in impacts on both environmental and human health.
EUROCONTROL’s main contribution involved integrating the latest EUROCONTROL Aviation Outlook forecast to 2050 into the chapter "Overview of Aviation Sector", while using our suite of modelling tools to estimate noise and emissions impacts together with emissions forecasts based on the future outlook. The "Aviation Environmental Impacts" chapter covers both CO2 and non-CO2 emissions and highlights recommendations on adapting the sector to the impacts of climate change (referring to the 2021 EUROCONTROL climate change risks study, amongst others). The "ATM and Operations" chapter, inheriting from various EUROCONTROL studies and calculations, details notably the latest initiatives to enhance environmental performance under the Single European Sky (SES) performance scheme, as well as the expected savings in CO2 emissions anticipated in the SES ATM Master Plan.
1 EU27+EFTA: EU27 States as well as European Free Trade Association (EFTA) which is the intergovernmental organisation of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.
