✈️ In October 2023, Safe Landing spoke at the ‘Aviation Climate Impact Mitigation by 2030’ conference at the University of Bristol.
👨🏫 This event featured contributions from prominent aviation academics, researchers and engineers which led to some really interesting discussions about what can be done this decade to drastically reduce emissions from the sector. 📉
👨✈️ We were delighted to kick-off proceedings by delivering the first talk of the day to set the scene for the rest of the conference, which included detailed presentations and discussions on reducing warming contrail formation in particular. 🌥️
📚 The conference report has now been published (Oct 2024) in the Nature ‘Communications Engineering’ journal, and Safe Landing are featured: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00290-5.pdf
⏱️ We emphasised the issue with framing industry objectives such as “Net Zero by 2050” as ambitious, when in reality we have less than 10 years before we blow the global carbon budget for 1.5°C of global warming. Near-term action over the next 5 years is therefore absolutely vital if we are to have any chance of hitting our climate targets:
⏳ This helps us visualise clearly why, even if all of our optimistic projections for new technology, operations and alternative fuels are delivered (and there are severe risks to these), that aviation’s fair share of the global carbon budget (the grey area under the line) will be blown by the mid-2030s, even if we rapidly reduce emissions each year towards zero by 2035:
🌍 The current “Net Zero by 2050” strategy promoted by most of our industry will, even if delivered perfectly, overrun the remaining carbon budget by more than 3 times (the red area under the line). This will be catastrophic for the climate, the planet and many destinations that we enjoy flying to. 🔥
🛫 This emphasises the need to look past the distractions of decarbonisation solutions that will require decades to deliver, and for a laser-like focus on policy solutions (targeting a transformation in the way we travel) and actions such as contrail mitigation that we can potentially deliver within a few years.
👨🔬 Thanks to Kieran Tait (a member of our Safe Landing community) and others at Bristol University for organising the conference and inviting us! 🙏
✈ The conference wasn’t repeated in 2024, but we understand that a future conference may take place in 2025, which we hope to attend and share details of with our community!