On Tuesday, New Zealand’s biggest airline announced that it was dropping its target, set just two years ago, to reduce emissions by just under a third between 2019 and 2030.
In a statement, Air New Zealand’s CEO Greg Foran said that because of delays to the delivery of more fuel-efficient aircraft and because “so many levers needed to meet the target are outside our control”, the airline was dropping its target and withdrawing from the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), an influential non-governmental arbiter of corporate climate targets.
As several airlines have made similar targets for 2030 or 2035, the move has cast doubt on whether they can meet them. It has also raised difficult questions about the role of carbon offsets in decarbonising aviation, a sector that accounts for an estimated 2-3% of global emissions.
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Sustainability consultant and offset developer Chris Hocknell told Climate Home that Air New Zealand’s decision to leave SBTi shows that the body’s rules, particularly around offsets, are too harsh. He accused SBTi of “environmental zealotry”, a “lack of realism” and of not engaging with businesses trying to reduce their emissions.
But Thomas Day, a researcher at the New Climate Institute, said weakening SBTi’s rules to accommodate companies that are not aligned with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C would “completely defeat the purpose of 1.5C validations”.
Dutch airline KLM has a similar target to the one Air New Zealand has just abandoned, which it plans to meet with more efficient aircraft and cleaner fuels. Their spokesperson told Climate Home that they “are sticking to that [target]” but “at the same time, we recognise that it is not easy to decarbonise aviation”.
While Air New Zealand’s Foran partly blamed delays to the delivery of more fuel-efficient aircraft for dropping the target, the KLM spokesperson said their deliveries of new aircraft which consume about a quarter less fuel per passenger-kilometre are “currently more or less on schedule”.
But, the spokesperson said, “we recognise the picture Air New Zealand paints regarding the availability and pricing of alternative jet fuel” and “would like to see even more being done from governments to encourage production”.
Not enough biofuels
While fuel-efficiency can shave a chunk off a plane’s emissions, the only way to fly a plane without producing emissions is to stop using fossil fuels to power them.
Currently, the only non-fossil-based fuel commercially available is made from biofuels, turning crops like corn, soy and oil palm or used cooking oil into jet fuel.
But there is not enough of this being produced to meet demand and, as a result, it is currently more than four times as expensive as regular oil-based jet fuel.
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Jonathan Lewis, transport lead at the Clean Air Task Force, told Climate Home that he doubts whether there will ever be enough of these biofuels produced to power the world’s planes. A recent report he co-authored found aviation will need about 40% more energy in 2030 than all the world’s biofuels will be able to supply.
It’s a concern shared by the CEO of RyanAir Michael O’Leary. He told the Guardian in December: ” I don’t see where we will get the supply in the volumes we need. You want everybody running around collecting fucking cooking oil? There isn’t enough cooking oil in the world to power more than one day’s aviation.”
Even if the world could produce enough biofuels, that is likely to come with bad environmental and social side-effects, as the growing of crops to fuel planes displaces crops for food and encourages the chopping down of forests.
Other options for cleanly powering planes are fuels based on green hydrogen and ammonia. But these fuels are in early stages of development and would require big changes to airport infrastructure and, for hydrogen, aircraft design.
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Airlines’ climate targets are all based on emissions per passenger and per kilometre so flying less won’t help them meet them, but it will reduce their and the world’s total emissions.
No airline has said it will reduce flights for climate reasons, so any pressure on that is likely to come from consumers and governments. France recently banned some short-haul domestic flights to howls of protest from the airline industry.
Offsets to fill the gap?
Another way for airlines to meet their climate targets is for them to buy carbon offsets. Lewis said that that was likely to be “a necessary part of decarbonising the aviation sector”.
While many airlines have bought offsets whose claims of emissions reduction are highly questionable, initiatives like the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market are trying to improve the industry’s integrity.
But on the same day Air New Zealand announced it was leaving, the SBTi released the results of a consultation on the use of carbon offsets to meet climate targets.
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It found that the evidence it had reviewed “suggests that various types of carbon credits are ineffective” and “there could be clear risks to corporate use of carbon credits for the purpose of offsetting”.
This review, published by SBTi’s technical experts, struck a very different note to an earlier statement put out in April by the body’s board which said offsets “could function as an additional tool to tackle climate change” and “consequently, SBTi has decided to extend their use”.
That statement by the board prompted a revolt by staff, many of whom called on CEO Luiz Amaral to resign, which he did in July citing personal reasons.
Too strict or lax?
Hocknell accused SBTi’s technical experts of a “very puritanical approach” and said he hoped that SBTi’s pro-offsets elements won out in what he predicted would be a “big, big fight”.
Hundreds of companies have dropped out of SBTi after failing to follow through on a promise to set sufficiently ambitious climate targets. “If I get my crystal ball out, you’ll see hundreds more companies drop this before the end of the year,” said Hocknell.
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But New Climate Institute’s Thomas Day, who has accused SBTi of being too lax, told Climate Home “the purpose of the SBTi is to support the transformation of sectors and to offer a platform for companies who commit to this transformation.”
“It would completely defeat the purpose of 1.5C validations if the rules would be redefined to accommodate companies who are not willing or able to do so,” he added.
“If the technologies do not yet exist to put the aviation or oil and gas sectors on a 1.5C-aligned trajectory, then we need to recognise this and consider as a society how to address this, rather than moving the goalposts to pretend that everyone is on track,” Day said.
Pedro Martins Barata, the Environmental Defense Fund’s carbon markets lead, told Climate Home there were two ways of looking at Air New Zealand’s announcement.
One is that the airline set a target without measuring the consequences and “should get a reputational bad rap”. The other is that “in a voluntary system you need to walk players through how to increase their ambition over time and allow flexibility, or risk alienating corporate players and essentially becoming irrelevant in the process”.
“Are we better served by a small number of incredibly ambitious companies that can commit to far-reaching standards?” he asked, “or by having a much broader movement that can significantly impact climate change?”
“If you’re in the second camp,” he said, “you’d want Air New Zealand to do something even by purchasing good carbon credits, rather than simply walk away from it all.”
This article originally said incorrectly that Denmark had banned some short-haul flights.
(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Matteo Civillini)