Brace for turbulence: EU Member States’ climate strategies in the aviation sector

The European Green Deal (EGD) aims to transform the European Union (EU) into a climate neutral continent by 2050, requiring significant changes within carbon-intensive sectors. In this article, we examine EU Member States’ climate strategies in the aviation sector, where greenhouse gas emissions have doubled since 1990. We analyse EU National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) in order to examine national commitments on aviation. How frequently do EU Member States refer to aviation in their NECPs, and how can these references be understood thematically? First, by conducting a content analysis on all 54 draft and final NECPs, we identify how frequently eleven aviation-related terms were used. While all states increased the number of aviation references between their draft and final NECPs, Central and Eastern states showed the smallest increase. We show that Southern and Western Member States reference aviation most frequently in their final NECPs. Second, in our thematic analysis, we identify three key themes – ‘contextual information’, ‘public policy’, and ‘fuels and propulsion’ – that we divide into 27 sub-themes. Approximately half of the themes focused on contextual information, such as current aviation emissions, with the other half focusing on carbon reduction strategies, especially the EU Emissions Trading System, biofuels, and taxation. Western EU states provided the largest number of concrete policy statements on reducing aviation emissions and the promotion of biofuels. There were only two references to reducing the number of flights, across almost 7,500 pages of climate documents. We conclude that the NECPs represent a promising means of conducting cross-country climate policy analysis, in order to compare efforts across economic sectors within Europe. With our analysis, we create a pre-pandemic sectoral baseline for aviation which can be used for further study.