Transforming Aviation’s Impact on the Climate: Rethinking the Research Strategy

Aviation is under tremendous pressure to mitigate its impacts on the climate, but the best response strategies are unknown today due to deep uncertainties. How low-emission fuels will scale to levels relevant for the industry, along with the best strategies for managing contrails and other non-CO₂ effects, are unknowable today with unknown cost and disruption. A conventional risk-based approach that involves investment across a known set of options is unworkable; instead, we argue that an experimentalist approach is needed that addresses deep uncertainties head on. This hinges on four key factors: a critical mass of actors facing strong incentives to identify solutions, a wide search for alternatives through experiments, periodic assessments, and adjustment of goals and strategies. Present strategies do not give enough attention to higher-risk alternatives with disruptive potential, because those approaches have few political and organizational supporters. Small groups of highly motivated actors─such as the nascent coalition of first movers on clean aviation already forming in Europe and the U.S.─could initiate an experimentalist program. The challenges of the aviation sector mirror other hard-to-abate sectors, making this framework potentially applicable to a wider set of sectors where technological, business, and investment choices are shrouded in deep uncertainty.