The role of air transportation in emissions through energy usage: Evidence from global data

Investigating the role that air transportation plays in regard to carbon emissions offers several valuable insights and contributions that are critical for addressing climate change and promoting sustainable development as far as climate mitigation, policy development and evaluation, technological innovation, public awareness engagement, international cooperation, and risk management and resilience are concerned. Such studies are of importance since aviation holds approximately 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Therefore, this study aims to search for the role of air transportation in pollutant emissions around the globe. A global data split by regions and income groups is constructed and evaluated through the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) methodology. Results reveal that means of air transportation generally exert statistically significant effects on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions; however, the signs of coefficients of air transportation are in mixed directions across different regions and income groups. The study concludes that alternative air transport systems such as solar‐powered aircraft and technological innovations should be seriously considered as a business strategy due to increasing pollutant emissions.