Strategies to Mitigate Carbon Emissions for Sustainable Aviation: A Critical Review From a Life-cycle Perspective

The international aviation industry is one of the fastest growing industries, resulting in an increase of greenhouse gas emissions. Controlling aviation carbon emissions is needed to further prevent future climate change as the demand for aviation continues to expand. Effective ways should be taken to control aviation carbon emissions, namely identifying the set of driving factors behind the carbon emissions, as well as, exploring low-carbon technologies in aviation. However, few studies have systematically identified the driving factors and given a timeline list of aviation low-carbon technologies. Therefore, from the life cycle perspective (including the aircraft designing, operating, and recovery), this paper applies text mining and literature metrology to identify the driving factors systematically. Moreover, an evaluation model is established to present the prioritization of factors, and the Delphi method is applied to create a timeline list of the low-carbon technologies in the aviation industry. The results show that demand, technological improvement, and alternative fuels are the most important factors affecting carbon emissions in the aviation industry, with their contribution percentages of 16 %, 14 %, and 12 %, respectively. In the short term, aviation relies more on policies to reduce emissions (supported by 79 % of experts). In the long term, technological progress enables the production of increasingly mature alternative fuels as well as reduces production costs. Among the set of experts, 74 % support strategies relating to renewable fuel and low carbon technologies as the main factors for the aviation industry to reduce carbon emissions.