BACKGROUND

Airports rely on aviation activity forecasts for many reasons, including long-range planning and financing. Aviation forecasting is generally based on various assumptions about socioeconomic trends, but it is becoming increasingly clear that climate change may affect air traffic activity, either directly (e.g., higher temperatures affecting aircraft performance) or indirectly (e.g., through policy). Airports need to ensure their forecasts consider climate change, but there is limited understanding of its possible impacts and how to incorporate climate change into long-range forecasting. Research is needed to provide airports with information and methods to evaluate the potential impact of climate change and climate change policy on future aviation activity and incorporate the effects into their aviation demand forecasts.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this research is to develop a primer and guide to help airport industry practitioners incorporate climate change effects (i.e., impacts and mitigation) into aviation forecasts.

The primer should provide practitioners with a general understanding of how climate change is affecting aviation, including at a minimum:

• High-level discussion of current understanding, terminology, and knowledge gaps;
• Effects on society (e.g., migration and settlement patterns, demographics);
• Trends in domestic and international governmental and industry policies and goals (e.g., carbon pricing, greenhouse gas emissions limits); and
• Related aviation technology trends (e.g., sustainable aviation fuels, electric propulsion) to address emission reduction and climate change effects.

The guide should include at a minimum:

• Methods for incorporating climate change effects into aviation forecasts (e.g., passenger demand, cargo demand, aircraft operations, aircraft fleet mix);
• Resources of climate change expertise and data;
• Recommendations for selecting the most appropriate methods and resources to suit particular forecast needs; and
• Representative use case examples to demonstrate applicability of the above.

The guide should help practitioners adapt the methods to various airport sizes, markets (e.g., domestic, international), geographies, and climates. It should also allow practitioners to conduct sensitivity analyses (e.g., various rates of sea level rise, extreme weather events, changes in wind patterns, rising temperatures).

STATUS: Research is underway.