The elephant in the room: Long-haul air services and climate change

Abstract

This paper extends previous research that has examined the impact of banning (super) short-haul flights on climate change. Looking at all scheduled passenger flights worldwide, our results confirm that policies focused on super short-haul flights would have very limited climate benefits. Flights of less than 500 km account for 26.7 % of flights but only 5.2 % of fuel burnt, while flights of 4000 km or more account for just 5.1 % of flights, but 39.0 % of fuel burnt. When the results are broken down by region and country, it appears that the share of fuel burnt by long-haul flights varies according to social, political, economic and geographical factors, including remoteness. While fuel burnt is highly correlated with GDP at the country level, this is less true for long-haul flights, arguably because long-haul services are so geographically selective that not all countries can be expected to host them. We also find that since the mid-1990s, the long-haul segment has grown much more rapidly (+163 % seat-km) than the super-short-haul one (+28 %). These findings have important policy implications and suggest that “avoid” strategies should receive more attention than “shift” and “improve” strategies in aviation climate policy.