Clear Skies Ahead: a 2040 roadmap to cut aviation’s climate impact through navigational contrail avoidance

This event is led by the Aviation Impact Accelerator, an initiative convened by the Whittle Laboratory and Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cambridge. 

Aviation is responsible for a significant and growing contribution to climate change and is a hard-to-abate sector with few options for significant near-term decarbonisation. Contrail avoidance is one solution that has the potential to almost halve aviation-related climate warming over the short term; it can be achieved using the aircraft flying today, and involves asking a small proportion (~5%) of flights to make small vertical deviations (~2000ft) to avoid most (~80%) of this warming.  
 
This event will raise awareness of the climate opportunity associated with contrail avoidance and outline a policy roadmap to achieving this. It will be based on recent research from the Aviation Impact Accelerator at the University of Cambridge that shows how we can build up an avoidance system at a global scale by 2040. Success could enable us to recover 9% of the remaining Paris-aligned temperature budget, delivering climate mitigation at a cost as low as $1/tCO2e avoided.   

Facilitator: 

Brandon Staats, Policy, Strategy and Business Development Manager, Aviation Impact Accelerator, University of Cambridge 

Speakers: 

• Dr Samuel Gabra, Director, Aviation Impact Accelerator, University of Cambridge 

• Edmund Dickens, Senior Project Manager, Aviation Impact Accelerator, University of Cambridge 

• Brandon Staats, Policy, Strategy and Business Development Manager, Aviation Impact Accelerator, University of Cambridge 

Find out more: Annual COP Events 31 - National Business Initiative 

Please note: A Blue Zone pass is required to attend this event.