UCL-Energy staff collaborate on 'Air Transportation and the Environment' Special Issue

A Special Issue on “Air Transportation and the Environment” has been published in the July 2014 volume of Transport Policy, the official journal of the World Conference on Transport Research Society (WCTRS).

This special issue of Transport Policy is co-guest edited by Profs. Andreas W. Schäfer (UCL) and Ian A. Waitz (MIT).  It brings together analyses carried out by the integrated aviation modeling teams at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge & UCL Energy Institute over the past 5-8 years.  All contributions directly or indirectly relate to the challenges of measuring and/or responding to the environmental impact of air transportation in terms of noise, air pollution, and climate change. 

Several members of the UCL Energy Institute contributed to that issue: Dr. Olivier Dessens and coworkers on aviation and climate change, Dr. Antony Evans and Prof. Andreas W. Schäfer on simulating airline operational responses to airport capacity constraints, and Evans, Schäfer and collaborators on the implications of funding airline fleet replacement by a carbon tax.  The contributors to this special issue identify several promising mitigation opportunities.  However, in light of an anticipated continued growth in global aviation demand in the order of 5-6% per year, the identified opportunities are likely to only mitigate the growth in environmental impacts, at least over the next 20-30 years.

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