Tourist Aviation Emissions: A Problem of Collective Action

Abstract

While transportation currently accounts for 23% of total global energy-related CO₂ emissions, transport emissions are projected to double by 2050, driven significantly by continued high growth in global passenger demand for air travel. Addressing high growth in aviation emissions is critical to climate stabilization. Currently we rely on individual decisions to forego air travel as the means of reducing these high-risk emissions. In this paper we argue that encouraging voluntary responses to such risks cannot succeed because of the nature of human reason and the structure of the problem itself. We use decision-making theory to explore why individuals have been generally unwilling or unable to act upon these risks, and collective action theory to illustrate the futility of relying on uncoordinated actors in such cases. Participation in the high-carbon air travel regime is a social convention, and transition from social conventions requires coordination among players. Our theoretical discussions lead us to conclude that it is our moral duty to promote coordinated collective action, via national or global policy mechanisms, to address tourist aviation emissions. We offer various avenues of future research to advance this moral duty.

Keywords

climate change aviation emissions decision-making theory risk assessment cognitive bias social conventions collective action

Introduction

Transportation currently accounts for approximately 23% of total global energy-related CO₂ emissions and transport emissions are projected to double by 2050 (Creutzig et al. 2015). Air travel produces a large and growing portion of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (Creutzig et al. 2015; Bows-Larkin et al. 2016). The rapid growth in demand for aviation is attributed in part to subsidization in the form of aviation fuel exemption (Oberthür 2003), which suppresses the imperative for airlines to seek fuel efficiencies. Global passenger demand for air travel continues to grow at 5% to 6% per annum (Bows-Larkin et al. 2016), while efficiency gains have consistently failed to meet the 1.5% per annum target (2009–2020) set by ICAO (EFTE 2016). Indeed “even under the most aggressive technology forecast scenarios, the anticipated gain in efficiency from technological and operational measures does not offset the expected growth in demand-driven emissions” (ICAO 2016, p. 12; see also Mayor and Tol 2010; Peeters et al. 2016). ICAO concedes that “aviation emissions are expected to grow by up to 300% by 2050 unless action is taken” (EFTE 2016, p. 2; see also Owen, Lee, and Lim 2010; Lee, Lim and Owen 2013a, 2013b). Public pressure is building upon the air transportation sector to significantly reduce aviation greenhouse gas emissions (Sgouridis, Bonnefoy, and Hansman 2011).

Addressing transport emissions is critical to climate stabilization (IPCC 2014a), and the implications for the energy- and carbon-intensive tourism industry (Becken 2011) are significant (Scott, Hall, and Gössling 2012). Tourism accounts for 5% of global carbon emissions (Peeters and Dubois 2010), and even without accounting for radiative forcing (Scott et al. 2008), aviation dominates the emissions profile of the tourism sector (Scott, Peeters, and Gössling 2010; Scott, Hall, and Gössling 2016a, 2016b). Forty percent of tourism emissions have been attributed to air travel (Gӧssling et al. 2009). Aviation emissions continue to rise in both absolute and relative terms, as other sectors take action to mitigate emissions (Bows and Anderson 2007; IPCC 2014; Bows-Larkin et al. 2016). Indeed Eickhout and Taylor (2016, online) argue that the aviation industry has

historically found itself in a parallel universe when it comes to the industry’s contribution to the fight against climate change. Airlines have been operating in a world where they pay no fuel taxes, are VAT-exempt, face no legally-binding fuel efficiency requirements, and have no limits placed on their CO₂ emissions.

An important debate surrounds the allocation of responsibility for a climatically damaging industry (Smith and Rodger 2009; Cohen, Higham, and Cavaliere 2011; Young, Higham, and Reis 2014). The case for special consideration because of its importance to global business (in both developed and developing world contexts) continues to feature in national (Wood, Bows, and Anderson 2012) and international (ICAO 2012; Aviation Benefits 2016) discourses on aviation emissions. The aviation industry has intensified its efforts to convince policymakers that sustainable aviation can be achieved through technology, alternative fuels, and operational innovations (Sustainable Aviation 2011). The promise of technology breakthroughs, leading to efficiency gains and climatically neutral or zero-emissions aviation, has been described as a myth that has been perpetuated to stall meaningful climate policy action for international aviation (Peeters et al. 2016).

Meanwhile aviation industry data show that the global commercial fleet of civil aircraft has more than doubled every 20 years since 1970; from 3700 aircraft in 1970 to 9100 in 1990 and 21,000 in 2010 (Boeing 2014; Airbus 2014). Even greater has been growth in revenue passenger kilometers (RPK), which increased ninefold between 1970 and 2010, from 500 billion RPK in 1970 to 4,500 billion in 2010 (Airbus 2014). It is expected that by 2030 a global fleet of 40,000 civil aircraft will produce 10,000 billion RPK per annum (Boeing 2014). An average annual worldwide growth rate of 3.5% is currently projected to 2050. At the same time, it is expected that fuel efficiency gains will decline to <1% per annum in the 2020s, with aircraft life spans and fleet replacement stretching over a period of decades (Bows and Anderson 2007; Peeters and Middel 2007). These timelines take us far beyond the need for immediate climate action as outlined in the Paris Climate Agreement (2015). The most recent UN calculations estimate that aviation emissions between 2015 and 2050 will account for more than one-quarter (27%) of the remaining carbon that may be emitted under the budget required to stabilize global temperature rise at +1.5–2.0°C as outlined in the Paris Climate Agreement (Carbon Brief 2016).

Transport is recognized as an expensive and difficult sector in which to reduce energy demand (Anable et al. 2012). Various command-and-control, market-based, and soft policy measures are available to achieve reductions in transport emissions (Friman, Larhult, and Gärling 2013; Sterner 2007). Yet there remains a significant implementation gap due to social lock-in in transport policy (Banister and Hickman 2013). High carbon transport use is entrenched (Randles and Mander 2009; Higham, Cohen, and Cavaliere 2014) and institutionalized (e.g., through frequent-flier programs; see Gössling and Nilsson 2010; Young et al. 2015) such that “radical transitions,” are required, rather than relying on changes in the behavioral practices of flyers (Schwanen, Banister, and Anable 2011). High-carbon transport use is a social convention that entrenches suboptimal social and environmental outcomes for everyone. It has been argued that such conventions can only be ended by coordinated action, since any unilateral exit simply disadvantages those leaving without affecting the convention itself (Mackie 1996; Hechter and Satoshi 1997; R. Hardin 1982).

This article specifically addresses the problem of aviation emissions, which threaten everyone’s well-being (Owen, Lee, and Lim 2010; Anderson and Bows 2011; IPCC 2014a, 2014b). To date technical gains, operational efficiencies and voluntary action (via restraint or the purchase of carbon offsets) have failed to have any meaningful effect on emissions growth in this sector (Gössling et al. 2007; Higham, Cohen, and Cavaliere 2014; Peeters et al. 2016), in the absence of structural change (Gössling et al. 2009; Schwanen 2016). To date, but for very few exceptions (e.g., the EU emissions trading scheme), the national and global policy response to this threat has been to rely on individual decisions to forego or offset air travel as the means of reducing aviation emissions.

In this article, we consider rational individual responses to those risks, such as voluntarily foregoing air travel, in relation to the effect of cognitive biases on human reasoning, and the structure of the problem that needs to be resolved. We use cognitive science to demonstrate the challenges that individuals face when they try to evaluate and act on climate change risks. We also draw on collective action theory to illustrate the futility of relying on uncoordinated actors in such cases, and the means by which we might escape the high-carbon transport regime. We argue that individual efforts to mitigate climate change by reducing or offsetting consumption of high-carbon transport can no longer be the preferred policy option, and that the problem of aviation emissions must be reframed as a question of collective rather than individual action. If so, it is our moral duty to promote collective action through national and/or global policy mechanisms. We explore the possibilities and conclude by offering our reflections on timely research questions arising.

(The Failure of) Uncoordinated Individual Responses to Aviation Emissions

The economic policies of neoliberal governments encourage unrestrained consumption of the products of global capitalism (Urry 2010). Restricting aviation unilaterally has been portrayed as reducing competitiveness in the global market. The response of governments has therefore been to encourage voluntary public behavior change toward lower carbon lifestyles (Barr et al. 2010), an approach that in the context of discretionary tourist air travel has been ineffective to date (Cohen, Higham, and Cavaliere 2011; Miller et al. 2010). While low-cost carriers (LCCs) claim to have increased social inclusion in tourism, discretionary air travel is dominated by wealthy “high emitters” who have used distance to reproduce and entrench existing class distinctions in holiday behaviors (Casey 2010). This suggests that only collective action, instantiated through governments via multilateral agreements and national legislation, can substantially reduce or even slow the growth of aviation emissions that are far too high to be “neutralized” by offset schemes (Becken and Mackey 2017).

It is well established that voluntary behavior change to reduce levels of personal aeromobility has not and will not adequately address high and growing aviation emissions (Lassen 2010). Extensive literatures drawing upon a range of disciplinary perspectives address the challenges of relying on individual responses to common threats. The significant challenges of climate change have been extensively considered in the fields of economics, sociology, and psychological science, among others (see Stern 2007; Randles and Mander 2009; Urry 2009; van der Linden 2014; van der Linden, Maibach, and Leiserowitz 2015). Similar attention has been paid to climate change specifically in relation to discretionary air travel and the tourism industry (Tol 2007; Dwyer et al. 2012; Cohen, Higham, and Reis 2013). The literature now offers abundant evidence of a dissonance between awareness and attitudes and actual behavioral change (e.g., Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002; Miller et al. 2010; Hares, Dickinson, and Wilkes 2010; Hibbert et al. 2013; Kroesen 2013), despite growing public concern over the climatic and associated environmental impacts of air travel (Higham and Cohen 2011; Higham, Cohen, and Cavaliere 2014). Little traction has been gained in achieving emissions reductions in tourist air travel practices through voluntary consumer-led responses, whether that be through the public traveling less, holidaying domestically rather than abroad, giving preference to less distant destinations, transport modal shifts, or paying to offset the GHG emissions of flights (Miller et al. 2010; Dickinson, Robbins, and Lumsdon 2010; Mair 2011; Cohen et al. 2014; Becken and Mackey 2017). These failures have led to increasing calls for progressive political action to achieve radical aviation emissions reductions (Cohen et al. 2014; Young, Higham, and Reis 2014; Young et al. 2015).

Given widespread acceptance that climate change is a major risk to human well-being (Stern 2007; IPCC 2014a) and that international air travel is a largely discretionary activity that is a major cause of carbon emissions (Bows, Anderson, and Peeters 2009; Becken and Mackey 2017), why have voluntary consumer-led strategies been so ineffective? We will argue that such strategies are bound to fail owing to the way human beings reason about future harms. We begin by arguing that despite the beliefs just noted, travelers do not behave as if their discretionary air travel is morally problematic. We then employ the heuristics and biases literature (Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982) to explain this apparent disconnect between our beliefs about the harms caused by air travel and the insouciance with which we engage in this harmful activity. We set out a variety of well-established cognitive heuristics and biases that make it all but certain that travelers will not curb their own flying and that voluntary carbon offset schemes will not raise funds sufficient to cover the real costs of international air travel.¹

Problems of Risk and Rational Decision Making

The Moral Status of Air Travel

Human reasoning about future harms such as those associated with anthropogenic climate change (ACC) lead us to critically consider the moral status of air travel. Unlike the act of lying, most who travel by air do not treat flying as morally problematic (Cohen and Higham 2011; Higham, Cohen, and Cavaliere 2014). Even though a “white lie” might be best for all concerned, nobody wants to be caught in the act of lying. By contrast, even though commercial jet flight is always a harm to the environment and often a discretionary activity, flyers are not embarrassed to be seen boarding a plane. The behavior of flyers suggests that either they believe the benefits of their flight to outweigh its marginal costs, or perhaps they believe that flyers in general cannot accurately estimate the costs and benefits of air travel and hence they cannot be held responsible for failing in this particular moral calculation (Higham, Cohen, and Cavaliere 2014).

It might be objected at this point that flyers do not have to make accurate assessments of the costs of their flights because such information is readily available from carriers and various environmental and governmental organizations. There is some incomplete and mostly nontransparent information available (Becken and Mackey 2017), and flyers make assessments of the epistemic reliability of what information they do receive (Higham et al. 2016) and hence information discouraging unnecessary flights or promoting the benefits of carbon offsets has been found to be commonly ignored if it does not reinforce travelers’ preferred views on the relevant costs and benefits (Gössling et al. 2007; Cohen and Higham 2011). In this case, even if flyers believe the general scientific consensus about global warming (Higham, Cohen, and Cavaliere 2014), they might have little confidence in the available information if they think, for example, that environmental groups simply want to limit flying in general (and hence will not really be interested in their particular consequentialist calculation), or that airlines and governments will benefit from underselling the environmental costs and perhaps overselling the benefits of offset schemes.

Cognitive Biases and Judgments about Harms Caused by Flying

The insouciance of flyers may be usefully explained by the cognitive heuristics and biases characteristic of human assessments of future costs and benefits. These habits of mind have evolved in us to promote fast and efficient reasoning in common situations, but they have been demonstrated to produce faulty reasoning when employed in domains unlike those in which we evolved (Gigerenzer and Todd 1999). So are people really unable to comprehensively assess and act upon the costs and benefits of their own air travel?

Availability Bias

When asked to make judgments of relative risk, people rely on their ability to call to mind instances of the harms in question (Esgate and Groome 2005). A sensible means for a hunter-gatherer to assess the likelihood of encountering a lion was to call to mind actual sightings and reports from trusted friends. In the modern world, the same inductive mechanism works less well. Subjects in a study by Lichtenstein et al. (1978) judged incorrectly that deaths from accidents were more common than deaths from diseases (when the latter are 16 times more common than the former). They also judged that murder was more common than deaths from diabetes or stomach cancer. In a follow-up study, Coombs and Slovic (1979) show that such judgments are correlated with selective reporting in newspapers. We are more likely to see reports of deaths by accident or foul play than deaths from illness, and hence we intuitively think of accidents and murders as more likely ways in which we might die.

So what does availability bias tell us about our reasoning concerning air travel and global warming? In one sense the relevant harms are all around us (weather destruction, flooding, extinctions, famine etc.) but these are sorts of harms that have always occurred and hence do not specifically signal future risk in a warming world. The sort of harms that would unequivocally signal global climate catastrophe (radical permanent climate shift, massive sea level rise, etc.) are all yet to happen and hence are not cognitively available to tweak the intuitions of the traveling public. Kates (1962) argues that underreaction to threats of flooding may arise from “the inability of individuals to conceptualize floods that have never occurred.” Hence availability bias makes us think that global climate catastrophe is unlikely, despite what the scientists say (IPCC 2014b), and so it predisposes us to think that the benefits of our travel in all likelihood outweigh the costs.

Confirmation Bias

Wason (1960) shows that people look for confirming rather than disconfirming evidence for theories they antecedently prefer. This is true both in the way we test theories and in the way we choose sources of information to assist in theory evaluation. When asked to assess a mathematical rule, subjects who expressed high confidence in their assessments routinely failed to consider potential falsifying instances. More generally, people look for patterns that confirm their preconceptions, failing to test patterns that would prove them wrong. If we really wanted to test our world-views, right-wing people would watch left-wing newscasts on the off-chance that their opponents might prove them wrong, but that is not the way humans generally function (Wason 1960).

Taber and Lodge (2006) show that this effect is even stronger when the theory in question is emotionally charged (e.g., political beliefs). When the phenomenon in question is highly stochastic, like climate, it is very easy to find phenomena that corroborate one’s own beliefs. Similarly, as long as people believe there are some skeptical experts, confirmation bias will motivate them to ignore the views of nonskeptics. So, it should not be surprising that some travelers are still skeptics about global warming. This effect will be stronger for people who rely on social media for their news as social media amplifies the opinions of like-minded people (Bozdag 2013). It will be stronger still in individuals who have a great desire to travel or who are politically skeptical about government intervention in daily life because these factors will make such decisions more emotionally charged. So confirmation bias may cause those who fly regularly to think that their travel decisions are better supported by the science than they really are.

Probabilistic Reasoning and the Conjunction Fallacy

The problem of assessing costs and benefits in the face of global warming is made all the more difficult by the fact that the evidence is highly probabilistic. Human beings are much better at making simple logical deductions than they are at assessing probabilities. People routinely break the rules of probability claiming, for example, that the future risk of A+B is greater than the risk of A (Tversky and Kahneman 1974; for an application in the context of environmental policy, see Medvecky 2012). Moreover, assessments of likelihood are often influenced by the specificity or vividness with which phenomena are described (Yudkowsky 2008). As the dangers of global warming are diffuse and wide-ranging, people are likely to mentally discount them while accentuating the risks of vivid and specific (but unlikely) scenarios involving terrorism for example. Faced with this problem, newscasters can accurately depict climate using diagrams and statistics that, by their nature, are insufficiently vivid. Alternatively, they can show hair-raising videos of wild weather but, as most people are now well aware, weather and climate are very different things.

It may be due to these cognitive biases that travelers are unlikely to be reliable at estimating the real risk posed by global warming and hence are likely to underestimate the cost of their own individual acts of air travel to themselves and future generations. That said, many people do agree that global warming is a threat and that it is exacerbated by air travel (Higham et al. 2016). This leads us to consider what cognitive bias tells us about the prospects for voluntary carbon offset schemes.

Cognitive Biases and Judgments about Carbon Offset Payments

Payments to ameliorate future costs are sensitive to perceptions of risk (Zhou-Richter, Browne, & Gründl 2010). Someone who knows their car will eventually expire, knows that it is prudent to try to save the full amount of a replacement. Someone who owns a house and thinks it possible, but unlikely, that their house will burn down, will be willing to pay an amount for insurance that is leavened by their perception of the fire risk (Zhou-Richter, Browne, & Gründl 2010). This is unfortunate given the difficulty for travelers of assessing the likely harms caused by a particular flight. The problem is made worse given the cognitive biases outlined above, which make travelers likely to underestimate the extent to which an isolated individual act of air travel will exacerbate the risks of global warming. A further problem is presented by cognitive biases that diminish our ability to make intuitive numerical assessments of value, and particularly of judgments about how much we should pay to ameliorate future harms.

Anchoring and Adjustment

Human reasoning can be strongly affected by information that has little to do with the problem an individual is trying to solve. For example, when asked to make a snap judgment (in under 5 seconds) of the product of the numbers one through eight, subjects presented with the calculation “1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 = ?” guessed on average 512. Those presented with the calculation “8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = ?” guessed on average 2250 (Tversky and Kahneman 1974). Anchoring is a cognitive bias in which people’s intuitive judgments are strongly influenced by an initial reference value and then adjusted around that value. The anchor might be an initial estimate of the value of some item over which individuals are bargaining but the anchoring effect still occurs where the initial value is obviously wrong and unrelated to the problem at hand (Strack and Mussweiler 1997) and even where subjects are specifically warned to guard against the effects of anchoring with respect to a particular judgment (Wilson et al. 1996).

Given that advertisers are well aware of this effect, they are in a good position to influence travelers to make low estimates of what counts as a reasonable carbon offset. Given Tversky and Kahneman’s findings, we can predict that airlines that offer carbon offsets to the value of $200 or $100 or $50 or $20, will receive different offset payments than ones that offer offsets to the value of $20 or $50 or $100 or $200. Passengers of the first airline will anchor on $200 and adjust from there while passengers of the second will anchor on $20 and so likely end up with a much lower estimate of the value of a reasonable carbon offset fee. If this is right, the effectiveness of voluntary carbon offset schemes are likely to be strongly influenced by factors that have little or nothing to do with the amount of harm done by global air travel and the amount of money required to ameliorate that harm. A further problem for voluntary offset schemes is raised by a group of studies suggesting that estimates about what it is reasonable to pay to ameliorate uncertain future harms, are often completely decoupled from estimates of the relevant risk. The discussion here addresses cognitive presumptions, setting aside the manifold reasons to reject offsetting as an adequate response to accelerating aviation emissions (Smith and Rodger 2009; Becken and Mackey 2017).

Scope Insensitivity

Kahneman and Knetsch (1992) argue that people donating to charity often see themselves as purchasing moral satisfaction and that the amount they are willing to pay is relatively insensitive to the actual nature and extent of the harm to be ameliorated. Subjects were asked how much of a tax increase they would accept to install nets protecting migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds. They were told that the problem affects 2,000 or 20,000 or 200,000 birds annually. The average assessment of a reasonable payment to prevent this harm was $80, $78, and $88 for each of the three cases. Kahneman, Ritov, and Schkade (1999) argue that willingness to pay here is most likely driven not by the size of the problem but by “a mental representation of a prototypical incident, perhaps an image of an exhausted bird, its feathers soaked in black oil, unable to escape” (p. 212).

Scope insensitivity will obviously limit the estimated size of “reasonable” carbon offset payments in a way that is insensitive to the actual costs of the relevant harms or the costs of possible amelioration strategies. If the amount that air travelers are prepared to pay in voluntary carbon offset schemes is driven not by the magnitude of the harms caused by air travel but by the subjective cost of moral satisfaction, or achieving a warm fuzzy feeling from “helping,” then such schemes will be insensitive to the size of the harms they are designed to ameliorate.

Evolution has bequeathed human beings a psychology that focuses on proximate threats and opportunities (Dyke and Maclaurin 2002). Consequently we are poor at estimating the risks of large-scale, complex, long-term threats such as global warming. Our intuitions about how to deal with possible threats are relatively insensitive to large-scale long-term dangers (Dyke and Maclaurin 2013). It is therefore inevitable that most people will have unreliable judgments about modifying their behavior in light of global warming. In short, it is evident that the effects of international air travel on global warming cannot be addressed by encouraging individuals to abstain from travel or make charitable donations to carbon offset schemes (Gössling et al. 2007; Miller et al. 2010; Hibbert et al. 2013; Kroesen 2013; Young, Higham, and Reis 2014; Bows-Larkin et al. 2016; Becken and Mackey 2017).

A Problem of Collective Action

We have now identified the problem: unconstrained and accelerating emissions associated with air travel threaten everyone’s well-being (IPCC 2014b); neither technological efficiency gains nor voluntary action via restraint or the purchase of carbon offsets have had or can have a meaningful effect on emissions growth (Bows-Larkin et al. 2016). We have also demonstrated that the most common present-day response to the problem—encouraging voluntary, individual rational responses to those risks—cannot succeed because of the nature of human reason and the structure of the problem itself. At this point, then, rather than despair of the possibility of bringing our travel-related aviation GHG emissions under control, we turn to a much more promising solution—reframing the issue as a problem of coordinated collective action.

Escaping the High-Carbon Air Transport Regime

“Collective action arises when the efforts of two or more individuals are needed to achieve an outcome” (Sandler 2004, 17). We have been looking at the individual-level decision to take a flight and therefore emit a certain amount of GHGs, increasing, however marginally, the risk of damage from associated climate change. The relevant outcome here is the threat risk we seek to reduce, and this threat risk arises from the aggregated effects of the industry as a whole.² Although as individual flyers our decisions may increase experienced risk by a small amount, the risk we seek to mitigate is the one arising from all of our actions, aggregated, not the risk that arises from our (per impossibile) isolated behavior. We might, with Derek Parfit, call the individual-level approach the error of “ignoring the effects of sets of acts.” The moral logic of sets of acts is different than the moral logic of isolated ones (Parfit 1984, 70). This is why the trope of accusing climate change activists of hypocrisy when they fly is mistaken. Their moral duty is to promote the collective actions that can reduce the wrong in question (excess GHG emissions). Not only are they incapable of effecting the desired change via uncoordinated action, but in many cases they would be acting contrary to duty by weakening themselves vis-à-vis the defenders of the high-carbon transport regime (see note 2).

Once we reframe the problem of adding GHG emissions to the global atmospheric sink via airline travel as a collective action problem, we can see that refraining from doing so is likewise collective. It is helpful to think of the remaining capacity of the earth’s systems to absorb excess GHGs as a global public good, one that no one can be excluded from using but one that requires action on at least some and probably many people’s parts to provide. In cases of public goods like the global atmospheric sink, the best description of the moral dilemma faced by all of us is the “tragedy of the commons” (G. Hardin 1968; Ostrom 1990; Brousseau 2012). In the absence of coordinated collective action to reduce emissions, each of us faces a choice between (1) reaping the immediate, excludable³ gains associated with airline travel along with the miniscule, delayed, and distributed costs of damage done by our additional individual emissions, or (2) foregoing immediate excludable gains, and avoiding the small portion of costs our travel would have distributed to us along with everyone else on the planet. Combine this structural circumstance with the arguments given earlier about human reason and risk assessment, and one can see that nearly everyone would choose certain short-term individual gain over uncertain long-run collective loss prevention (see also Akerlof 1991).

The “tragedy” in the tragedy of the commons now makes itself plain: if everyone chooses short-run gain and its associated distributed costs, everyone will end up worse off. An individual recognizing this collectively irrational outcome could choose unilaterally to forego air travel and its associated gains and emissions. Then that individual would lose the excludable benefits of air travel while experiencing all of the distributed effects of everyone else’s emissions; the “warm glow” gained by refusing to dump excess GHGs into the atmosphere is more than counterbalanced by the cold reality that the collective outcome remains unsustainable (Andreoni 1990; Kahneman and Knetsch 1992). Our moral duty, then, is to advance coordinated collective action on tourist aviation emissions.

The Intergovernmental International Aviation Policy Context

The international policy context regarding aviation emissions is historically complicated (Stern 2007; Smith and Rodger 2009). Twenty years ago, international aviation emissions were excluded from the Kyoto Protocol (1997), because of the lack of agreement on the calculation and allocation of emissions (see Smith and Rodger 2009). At that time, responsibility for addressing international aviation emissions was devolved to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).⁴ Over the course of two subsequent decades (since 1997) there has been a growing sense of apprehension and disquiet arising from the lack of effective action and progress made under the ICAO framework (Smith and Rodger 2009). More recently, the European Parliament’s Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (2015, 9) observed that “initiatives and actions taken by ICAO and IMO [International Maritime Organisation] to address GHG emissions started late and have been insufficient . . . they do not take appropriate account of global decarbonisation requirements.”

After many years of failure to adequately respond to international aviation emissions (Bows, Anderson, and Peeters 2009), most notably the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (the Copenhagen Summit 2009), a breakthrough was achieved at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the UNFCCC. The Paris Climate Agreement (L’Accord de Paris), which was drafted between 30 November and 12 December 2015, carries the commitment of 196 countries (Parties to the Agreement) to the overarching goal of stabilizing global average temperatures below +2°C relative to preindustrial levels (UNFCCC 2015). Indeed most of the signatories have committed to the “intent to pursue a +1.5°C target.” This “remarkable international consensus . . . has set the world on a new path of international collaboration on the grand challenge of global climate change” (Scott, Hall, and Gössling 2016b, p. 1). Governments now face the significant challenge of developing policies and strategies to meet their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that are aligned with stated 2030 emission reduction goals (UNFCCC 2015).

The Paris Climate Agreement was celebrated as a great diplomatic success (Harvey 2015) and a critical turning point in the transition to a low carbon global economy (Vidal, Stratton, and Goldenberg 2009). However, the success of the Paris Climate Agreement (2015), and its implications for global well-being, will be determined by the execution of the 2030 NDCs (Clémençon 2016). Scott, Hall, and Gössling (2016b, p. 1) observe that the Paris Climate Agreement “sets a new trajectory for international and national climate policy” and the climate policy responses of the Paris signatories will largely determine whether the most severe consequences of human-induced climate change can be averted (Bailey and Jackson Inderberg 2016). One particularly notable omission from the Paris Climate Agreement, however, was specific targets for international aviation (Scott, Hall, and Gössling 2016b). Critical questions relating to precisely how aviation emissions mitigation will be achieved, and the policy relationship between international aviation and national NDCs, remained unanswered at the close of the Paris climate negotiations.

The exclusion of aviation from the Paris negotiations was considered “a major shortcoming” in the Paris Climate Agreement (Scott, Hall, and Gössling 2016b, p. 6). The United Nations responded by charging ICAO with the critical task of addressing this significant gap in the provisions of the agreement (Tollefson 2016). While the Paris Climate Agreement has been recognized as an important, if long overdue, progressive step, the intergovernmental policy response to the exclusion of aviation emissions, was delegated to the 39th ICAO General Assembly (Montréal, Canada, 27 September–7 October 2016). The Air Transport Action Group (ATAG) issued a press release at the conclusion of the COP21 Climate Talks in Paris, appealing to governments attending ICAO’s 39th Assembly to “redouble their efforts in progressing a global market-based measure for the aviation sector (and) . . . to increase their engagement and ambition to reach agreement” (ATAG 2015, n.p.).

Collective Action

As we saw in the first section of this article, the accelerating effects of uncontrolled air travel–related GHG emissions are a growing threat to our collective social and environmental well-being (Bows-Larkin et al. 2016), even threatening our continued existence (IPCC 2014a, 2014b). The collective action perspective does not expect individuals to respond in an uncoordinated way to the risks of tragic outcomes like this one, since uncoordinated individual action merely exposes each individual to the certain loss of personal benefits of air travel and the likely costs of everyone else’s unchecked emissions (Higham et al. 2016). Instead, the collective action perspective directs our moral reason to search for the means to coordinate our actions and reduce both risks and uncertainty (Ellis 2016). What, then, should we do?

Standard solutions to problems of the commons include privatization and regulation (G. Hardin 1968; Sinden 2007). The privatization solution eliminates free riding and gives actors longer-run interests in sustainable management of the resource. Privatization works well for some resources (relatively bounded fisheries, for example), but cannot work for the global atmospheric sink, which is unbounded in principle (Libecap 2012; Sinden 2007). To achieve the coordination that would reduce GHG emissions to sustainable levels, we must regulate our common behavior so that our aggregated pursuit of short-run individual interests does not, as Garrett Hardin puts it, “bring ruin to all” (G. Hardin 1968).

To argue that collective action is needed is not to argue that market signals do not work to coordinate mass behavior: price signals are essential to any collective effort, via international agreement and/or national legislation, to reduce aviation emissions. Cap-and-trade schemes like the proposed Australian carbon pollution reduction scheme or the recently strengthened European Union Emissions Trading System can reduce absolute emissions if they combine an inclusive market with a “sinking lid” scheme for annual reductions in permitted emissions such that emitters experience a real and increasing price for carbon-intensive activity. Other essential aspects of such a policy include strong monitoring and enforcement, systems to reduce volatility, and mechanisms like price collars to ensure that the outcome of the scheme improves on business as usual (Schmalensee and Stavins 2017).

We can view the high-carbon air transport system as a suboptimal social convention that requires coordinated action to change (Lewis 1969; Mackie 1996; Hechter and Satoshi 1997; Sugden 2004). For these kinds of problems, including not only high-carbon transport but a wide variety of social norms that members cannot unilaterally abandon without paying prohibitively high personal costs, coordination in the form of regulation is essential (G. Hardin 1968; R. Hardin 1982). But, crucially, the regulation solution does not require a global sovereign or even an all-inclusive regulatory regime (Ostrom 1990). Research supports the efficacy of commons-managing regimes that operate as clubs (Nordhaus 2015), begin with a critical mass of key actors (Brechin 2016), harness the advantages of leadership to encourage early adoption of new standards (Sandler 2004), and focus on short-run co-benefits of cooperation rather than long-run sustainability (Olson 1965).

How to Get There from Here

Global Leadership for Collective Action

Global policy leadership has been the exclusive domain of the member nations of the ICAO. Following the Paris instructions of the UNFCCC (2015), on Friday, October 7, 2016, the ICAO 39th General Assembly passed a resolution to implement a global regime to address aircraft CO₂ emissions, claiming in doing so to be the first industry sector to adopt a global mechanism to address its carbon emissions (Fountain 2016). On that date the ICAO members agreed to a global market-based mechanism (GMBM), the “Montréal Agreement,” in the form of a carbon offsetting and reduction scheme for international aviation (CORSIA). This differs from the “cap and trade” approach of the European Union’s aviation emissions trading scheme (ETS) in that it does not require airlines to stabilize or reduce CO₂ at source (Rock 2016). The agreement begins with a voluntary pilot phase (2021–2023), the purpose of which is unclear (Hodgkinson and Johnston 2016). The first “formal” phase (2024–2026), which is also voluntary, and the second mandatory phase (2027–2035) then follow. The USA and China were notable early volunteer-phase participants, although the subsequently elected Trump Administration has reversed this commitment. Brazil, one of the fastest-growing aviation markets, declined to join until the mandatory second phase in 2027 (Hodgkinson and Johnston 2016). India and Russia also chose to opt out of the voluntary phases of the agreement.

A critical review of the Montréal Agreement reveals that CORSIA will only apply to CO₂ emissions (excluding NOx and particulates among others) (Rock 2016). The claim that ICAO has achieved a global agreement is undermined by the fact that CORSIA is voluntary and only applies to international flights of signatory nations. This excludes all domestic flights (about 40% of total global aviation emissions), which will only be accounted for in national emission inventories (such as the EU’s aviation ETS) if and where such inventories come to exist. Rock’s (2016) critique of the global coverage of CORSIA extends to the following:

Exemptions: in addition to domestic aviation emissions, exemptions also apply to all airlines that are responsible for emissions below the threshold figure of 10,000t CO₂ per annum, all aircraft below 5,700 kg maximum take-off mass, and all flights to or from Least Developed Countries (LDCs), Small Island Developing States (SIDs), and Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs).

Level of ambition: Only emissions that exceed the international aviation 2020 future baseline will be subject to CORSIA.

Distort behavior: As the scheme comes into effect, there is potential for airlines to re-route their scheduled international services to include near-destination airports that are located in countries that are exempt or excluded from CORSIA (i.e., LDC, SIDs or LLDCs), to avoid ICAO offsetting obligations (Rock 2016).

Even if CORSIA was able to overcome all of these problems, its anticipated use of offsetting and anticipated efficiency gains in a context of continued growth means that absolute reductions in emissions will not happen (Becken and Mackey 2017). These points highlight the failure to reach agreement on the goal of carbon neutral growth from 2020, which was agreed in principle at the 37th ICAO Assembly in 2010. CORSIA is estimated to apply to only 40% of total global aviation emissions. Despite this, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon welcomed the adoption of an emissions standard and congratulated the ICAO member states on progress toward controlling international aircraft emissions. He also called for “further strengthening of emissions standards as quickly as possible, in line with the scientific imperative for action” (United Nations 2016). EU Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc claimed that after years of failed negotiations, the most important outcome was to secure a deal in Montréal (Bulletin Quotidien Europe 2016). The more critical appraisals of the Montréal Agreement center on three key concerns.

First, there is doubt surrounding the very concept of carbon offsetting, not only because of the impracticalities of offsetting (see Smith and Rodger 2009) but because offsetting has little effect on net emissions and may function only as a “diversion from regulations that genuinely encourage emissions reduction, such as carbon pricing” (Hodgkinson and Johnston 2016). In addition, the Montréal Agreement is predicated upon carbon-neutral growth from a future (2020) baseline, which has been criticized as a “low bar for an international climate agreement” (Milman 2016). All emissions up to the 2020 benchmark, both pre-dating and post-dating that year, will not have to be offset, “despite representing the vast bulk of future emissions” (Milman 2016). Third, CORSIA is seen to be beset by loopholes. Participation is voluntary during the first phases (2021–2026) (Ryan 2016), and nations that volunteer to take part can opt out (Milman 2016). Writing in The Age (October 9, 2016), Ryan (2016) suggests that “the aviation industry has managed to get away for years with doing nothing about its growing carbon-emission problem, and now it’s giving itself even more years to do very little.” Fundamentally, aviation continues to exist with no limits on its CO₂ emissions (Eickhout and Taylor 2016). While claiming a global agreement for aviation, it is evident that ICAO has (again) failed to adequately respond to the UNFCCC (2015) imperative to address global aviation emissions in accordance with the Paris Climate Agreement.

Subglobal Leadership for Collective Action

Rational coordination of our collective flying behavior toward sustainability is possible at the global (intergovernmental) and subglobal (national) levels. Just as the global ban on CFCs was possible once major industrial producers realized that it was in their interests to lead rather than resist the transition, so wide-reaching regulation of air travel will be possible once some countries and NGOs step up to lead the way (Murdoch and Sandler 1997; Sandler 2004). For example, countries that adopt air transport carbon charges that return to the maintenance and enhancement of their tourism sectors will enjoy immediate short-run advantages over their competitors in the sector, as they will be replacing marginal and relatively invisible price advantages under the old regime with highly visible and marketable low-carbon advantages under the new one.⁵ Even though solutions at the subglobal level would still allow free riding and cost externalization in the short term, these subglobal solutions would pave the way for a more comprehensive regime in the future.

Once some have seized the advantages available to early adopters, the constellation of interests constraining the rest of the world shifts. Now everyone has an interest in joining the successful club rather than the group caught in a collective race to the bottom (cf. Roelfsema 2007). They now share an immediate reason to empower a central authority capable of solving their commons problem by insuring that no one is able to free ride profitably. Ideally this process would be undergirded by global norms articulated by the ICAO, which would further encourage individual countries to show the leadership that would make transition from the high carbon regime possible. To date, efforts to address international aviation emissions at the subglobal level have only been advanced by the European Union (Duval 2013). While the ICAO has expressed its strong preference to avoid a “dreaded patchwork” (Rock 2016) of national responses to reducing aviation emissions, that pathway now seems inevitable.

Conclusions and Avenues of Future Research

Air travel produces a large and growing portion of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (Boeing 2014; Airbus 2014). As a driver of anthropogenic climate change, aviation threatens everyone’s well-being (IPCC 2014a). The allocation of responsibility to respond to this threat may center on uncoordinated individual consumers and/or coordinated subglobal (national) or global (intergovernmental) policy action. Our article addresses the failure of uncoordinated individual responses to aviation emissions (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002; Miller et al. 2010; Kroesen 2013), by way of a theoretical analysis of the nature of human reason and the structure of the problem itself. Drawing on decision-making theory, we highlight the inability of individuals to accurately evaluate and act on the growing risks associated with aviation emissions. We conclude that participation in the high-carbon air travel regime is a social convention, and effective transition from social conventions requires policy-led coordination among players (Banister and Hickman 2013; Schwanen 2016), which in turn promotes our moral duty to seek collective action through urgent global or subglobal policy leadership.

We are facing a problem that individuals acting independently cannot resolve. It is a problem that not only hinders cooperation but blinds and delays us from seeing the costs associated with unrestrained anthropogenic climate change, which we will ultimately have to collectively confront (Stern 2007; IPCC 2014a). Ambitious reductions in transport CO₂ emissions can be achieved by reducing total global demand for high carbon transportation (speed, distance and frequency), energy intensity (fuel efficiency and modal shifts), and/or carbon intensity (fuel shift) (Peeters and Dubois 2010; Scott, Hall, and Gössling 2012). We argue that such ambitious reductions cannot be achieved by individuals operating in isolation because of a variety of cognitive heuristics and biases that make it most unlikely that travelers will voluntarily reduce, or otherwise mitigate the impacts of, their own flying, or that any such efforts will achieve “deep-cut” carbon mitigation (Becken and Mackey 2017).

The same cognitive heuristics and biases are likely to also apply to carbon offsetting. Barriers to the uptake of carbon offsetting fall into two categories; lack of knowledge and awareness (Chang, Shon, and Lin 2010; Gössling et al. 2009; McKercher et al. 2010) and the public perception that offsetting schemes lack credibility and are confusing and intransparent (Broderick 2008; Gössling et al. 2007; Polonsky, Grau, and Garma 2010; Higham et al. 2016). Decision-making theory and collective action theory have not been specifically tested in past research relating to aviation emissions reduction. Firstly, then, the research agenda should address cognitive biases and decision-making problems, and how the attitudes of air travelers might be influenced to encouraging meaningful voluntary air travel behavior change.

Collective action can take various forms, and many political, economic, legal, religious, and media (mass and social) institutions have important roles to play in building a gathering momentum of collective action. The Paris Climate Agreement requires that aviation emissions peak and then decline rapidly (Scott et al. 2016). To achieve this, policy makers must “use the full suite of policies at their disposal” (Creutzig et al. 2015, p. 911) in order to meet the nationally defined commitments expressed in the Paris Climate Agreement. While steps toward a collective response were achieved in the Montréal Agreement (2016), our theoretical discussions lead us to conclude that current international policy mechanisms, as expressed at the conclusion of the ICAO 39th General Assembly (Montréal October 2016), are inadequate, falling well short of the aspirational goals articulated in the Paris Climate Agreement (UNFCCC 2015). This represents a continuation of the longstanding failure of the ICAO to provide an adequate collective (intergovernmental) response to the aviation emissions quandary (Bows-Larkin et al. 2016). The contributions of these institutions are worthy of further research. Who are the members of ICAO and ATAG; who is represented in the executive structures; who is represented in their executive structures; what have been, and who is accountable for, their past actions? It is interesting to consider that government ministers and international agency leaders are prone to the same biases that we have addressed in this article. There is little reason to believe that national and international agencies are any less prone than individuals to the same biases and this, too, should be subject to empirical research.

Our discussions lead us to conclude with a call for urgent subglobal policy action on the part of national governments to respond to their own national and international aviation emissions, in accordance with their own Paris commitments as expressed in their NDCs (Scott et al. 2016). Thus, the way appears to have been opened for a so-called patchwork (Rock 2016) of national responses to aviation emissions mitigation, following the failure of an adequate intergovernmental response in Montréal. This signals a need to consider the competitive opportunities available to national tourism destinations that seek a position of leadership in sustainable aviation. Two decades of failed global measures⁶ has opened the way for leadership exercised by vanguard national governments to change the game for the rest of the world. The ways and means by which national and regional destinations may make it possible to choose the collectively rational option of transition to sustainable travel offers a particularly timely and opportune avenue of research. To date we have seen “little appetite among policy-makers for seriously discussing thorny transport issues in public debates and international climate negotiations” (Creutzig et al. 2015, p. 911). Unless this changes, little can be done to shake aviation from its “parallel universe” (Eickhout and Taylor 2016) and address aviation’s ever growing contribution to high-risk emissions.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank colleagues at the University of Otago, associate professor Paul Peeters (Breda University of Applied Sciences), and seminar participants in the Philosophy Department at the University of Arizona, the Centre for Moral, Social, and Political Theory at the Australia National University, the Political Theory Workshop at the University of California, San Diego, and especially Gerry Mackie and Geoffrey Brennan, for constructive comments on this work as it developed.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

James Higham is a professor of sustainable tourism at the University of Otago (New Zealand), visiting professor at the University of Stavanger (Norway) and Jim Whyte visiting professor at the University of Queenland (Australia). He is the co-editor of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.

Elisabeth Ellis is an associate professor of philosophy and politics, and director of the programme in philosophy, politics, and economics, at the University of Otago. Her recent work on environmental democracy appears in the Oxford Handbook for Environmental Political Theory. Ellis’s current project asks how we should distribute the risks of sea-level rise in a principled way.

James Maclaurin is a philosopher of science with particular interest in the life sciences, especially ecology and evolutionary biology. His research also spans the application of philosophical principles to the development of public policy in areas including public health, the social effects of artificial intelligence, and climate change.

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