The European Commission has announced that it plans to
temporarily “stop the clock” for one year on enforcing the inclusion of
aviation into its Emissions Trading System (ETS) for flights to and from
non-European countries. The proposed suspension - announced by EU Commissioner
for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard on Monday morning
- came just days after a meeting of the International Civil Aviation
Organization (ICAO) that saw signs of movement toward a possible deal on global
aviation emissions.
Suspension details
Under the current EU scheme, airlines landing in or
taking off from any of the EU’s 27 member states - as well as Iceland,
Liechtenstein, and Norway - must surrender carbon permits for the emissions
they produce. The aviation component of the ETS took effect on 1 January of
this year, and requires airlines to buy permits for 15 percent of those carbon
emissions, with the remaining 85 percent initially being provided to them for
free. Carriers had originally been told that they would need to purchase and
surrender these permits by 30 April 2013.
In effect, the one-year suspension announced on Monday
means that the EU will no longer require that allowances be surrendered next
April for the emissions from flights from or to non-EU countries during the
year 2012. The monitoring and reporting obligations for these same flights will
also be deferred for one year, according to the Commission.
While the requirement to purchase and surrender permits
for non-EU flights is now on hold, the legislation still applies to all
intra-EU flights, regardless of airline, according to the Commission.
Move follows progress at ICAO Council meeting
The EU has long pushed for a global aviation emissions
deal, but decided to incorporate aviation into its ETS after deeming that the
decade-long discussions at the ICAO - the UN’s civil aviation body - had been
moving too slowly. However, Hedegaard told reporters
on Monday, a global deal on aviation emissions has always been the 27-member EU
bloc’s top priority.
Following their meeting in Montreal last week, the ICAO’s
governing council agreed on Friday to establish a high-level policy group on
market-based mechanisms (MBMs). The ICAO Council also
agreed that the current options being discussed on regulatory market-based
mechanisms will have to be reduced from the present three alternatives to one
by the UN aviation body’s General Assembly in autumn of next year. There is
also, according to Hedegaard, an explicit reference
in the Council’s conclusions to the global market-based mechanism “that the
world now needs to agree on.”
Some environmental groups, meanwhile, have met the
results from last week’s ICAO meeting with a cautious - though optimistic -
response. “”After 15 years of ICAO inaction, it’s crystal clear now that a global
market-based measure for the aviation sector is simply a question of political
will,” Bill Hemmings of Transport & Environment,
a Brussels-based NGO, said in a statement. “These are critical times and the
world can no longer wait.”
Response from non-EU government officials, aviation
industry
The original decision to include aviation in the EU ETS
from 1 January of this year had prompted substantial pushback from a wide range
of countries - including the US, China, India, and Russia, among others - who
argued that Brussels was exceeding its authority by charging for emissions
produced outside EU airspace. China and India eventually banned their airlines
from participating in the scheme without government approval.
Chinese officials were among those to welcome the
European Commission’s announcement, with some officials - such as Li Gao, deputy director-general of climate change at the
National Development and Reform Commission, calling the move “a step in the
right direction” and arguing that the Brussels decision is a sign that
“unilateral measures are not a good way to deal with climate change issues.”
Jong Li, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, has said that Beijing is
ready to continue work on the subject on a multilateral level.