Aviation emissions are expected to increase through 2050, but at a slower rate than the increase in aviation demand, according to Gregg Fleming, director of Volpe’s Center for Environmental and Energy Systems.

Fleming’s perspectives on trends in greenhouse gas emissions, noise levels, and local air quality are provided in Destination Green, the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) 2013 environmental report. The ICAO report provides an overview of the aviation and environmental developments in the past two years.

According to Fleming, fuel efficiency is expected to improve through 2050, but additional measures will be needed to achieve ICAO’s aspirational goal of 2 percent per annum improvement in fuel efficiency.

Also, considering only aircraft technology and operational improvements, additional measures will be needed to achieve carbon-neutral growth by the year 2020. Sustainable alternative fuels may make significant contributions to achieving this additional ICAO goal, but sufficient data are not currently available to confidently predict their impact over the long term.

Fleming said, referring to Volpe's work in support of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), “Being able to analyze environmental trends and develop tools, to determine aviation impacts on the environment are keys to making sound decisions about mitigation.”

In the same ICAO publication, Volpe’s Chris Roof co-authored the article "The Aviation Environmental Design Tool" (AEDT) with FAA’s Fabio Grandi. The article describes the AEDT tool and how it facilitates the examination of environmental interdependencies between aircraft fuel burn, emissions, and noise. The authors note that when outputs from AEDT are combined with other FAA analysis tools, they are able to perform advanced cost-benefit analyses and impacts analyses.