Air Transport and the Environment

Air Transport and the Environment provides an overview of the main issues relating to aviation environmental impacts. It explains the challenge facing policymakers in terms of sustainable development, focusing on the importance of balancing the industry's economic, social and environmental costs and benefits, both for people living now and for future generations. Individual chapters review the current scientific understanding of the main aviation environmental impacts: climate change, local air pollution and aircraft noise. Various responses to those issues are also considered, including a range of policy options based on regulatory, market-based and voluntary approaches. Key concepts such as environmental capacity, radiative forcing and carbon offsetting are explained. In addition, the book emphasises the main implications of aviation environmental issues for policymakers and for the management of the air transport industry. This new edition covers developments in the literature, in the policy context and in the level of public concern about this issue since the book was first published. In particular, those developments include: growing scientific knowledge of, and concern about, climate change; the inclusion of aviation within the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS); innovations in the area of carbon management and a more substantial evidence base about practices such as carbon offsetting; the trials of various technological and operational systems and procedures intended to improve the environmental performance of air transport (such as biofuels, wheel-tugs, etc.); and the renewed public interest in - and controversy surrounding - issues such as airport expansion. It has also been revised to make the text more accessible and useful for those with responsibility for improving the environmental performance of air transport (including managers, policy officers, and analysts) and those responsible for the development and management of the industry (including regulators, operators and researchers).

Ben Daley is Lecturer in Environmental Management in the Centre for Development, Environment and Policy (CeDEP) at SOAS, University of London, and prior to this worked as a researcher at the Centre for Air Transport and the Environment (CATE), Manchester Metropolitan University. In addition to Air Transport and the Environment, he has written several further publications on the environmental impact and sustainability of air transport. Ben has also worked on other environmental issues, including the impact of tourism and coastal and marine environmental change. He is the academic convenor of the Sustainable Development programme in CeDEP and teaches environmental science, environmental management and environmental ethics.