Aviation emissions

The drastic reduction in economic activities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic creates a unique and timely opportunity to examine the environmental impacts of human activity. In several countries, the aviation sector was dramatically affected by the travel restrictions, resulting in a change of trip demand and in a drop of fuel consumption. Nonetheless, little attention has been paid to the impact of the pandemic on air travel demand, one of the fastest-growing sources of emissions globally. This paper estimates the impact of the COVID-19 on air travel demand and emissions in Brazil, the largest aviation market in Latin America. Combining detailed flight data with daily number of passengers and fuel consumption and data on combustion emission factors, we estimate CO2 emissions of domestic flights in Brazil. A Bayesian structural time-series model was used to estimate the impact of COVID-19 on daily trends of air travel demand and emissions. We find that the COVID-19 pandemic caused a reduction of 68% on national passengers and 62% in total CO2 emissions compared to what would have occurred if the pandemic had not happened. It avoided a total of approximately 4.6 megatons of CO2 between March and December 2020 in Brazil, the equivalent of one year of domestic flight emissions in France. Despite such a sharp drop in commercial aviation, passenger demand recovered to 64.2% of pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2020. CO2 emissions had a 52.6% reduction in 2020 and the emissions per capita increased after the COVID-19 outbreak. Although the precise impact of the COVID-19 on this figure is not yet fully understood, the fast recovery in domestic flights by December 2020 indicates that the emissions could soon return to pre-pandemic levels, demonstrating the challenges of reducing emissions in the aviation sector in the short term.

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