Greta Stacy is a high school science teacher in Doha, Qatar. She has previously taught in Ecuador and the United States.
Conversations about who contributes most to harmful emissions versus who feels the impacts of climate change most acutely are important to have in the classroom. International flights can be one example used to open such climate justice conversations. Students can use this interactive map to explore the scale of global aviation. This lesson about Airplanes and Climate Change allows students to understand the impacts air travel has on climate change.
Written By: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative
The MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, a part of MIT Climate HQ, provides the public with nonpartisan, easy-to-understand, and scientifically-grounded information on climate change and its solutions.
Every year, countries report their national greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which established an international agreement for combating climate change. Included in these reports, or “national inventories,” are emissions from domestic air travel—but not emissions from international flights.
Instead, these emissions are included in a category called “bunker fuels,” together with emissions from international shipping, which is reported separately to the UNFCCC.
Considering the contribution of air travel to global CO2 emissions—about 2.5% of all emissions from burning fossil fuels—it may come as a surprise that international travel often goes unmentioned in climate change agreements, such as the 2015 Paris Agreement. But these agreements are based on each country taking responsibility for reducing the emissions that occur within its borders, explains Jörgen Larsson, a researcher of sustainable consumption at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. “This means that it is not obvious who should take responsibility for emissions from international aviation,” Larsson says.
