Environmental Impact of the Flying Scenario : An Approach Towards Sustainable Air Transportation: A Case Study of India

It is a well acknowledged fact that the air transport at present is the fastest growing and the safest mode of transportation. And with this current trend, it is expected to be further expanding all around the globe. In India, the aviation market has witnessed massive growth making India the ninth largest aviation market in the world. It is expected to grow into the third largest position in the world by 2020. With this increasing growth, development and consolidation of the aviation market, it is inevitable that it will have serious implications for the environment. The harmful impacts of aviation on the environment are basically in terms of pollution (air, noise) and also in relation to the land use planning (for infrastructure use, terminals and runways). All of these ultimately contribute to climate change. Emissions from aviation are growing faster than any other mode of transportation. Also emissions from aviation is considered to be the fastest growing source of anthropogenic green house gases which include both CO2 and non-CO2 induced effects, as the aviation emissions have a greater climatic impact because aviation is the only sector in which bulk of gases are emitted in altitudes between 9 km and 12 km leading to a stronger climatic effect than from the emissions made at ground level. At current rates, with the amount of growth seen in this industry, it is expected that the share of emissions from the aviation sector to total greenhouse gas emissions will increase to about 20 per cent by 2020. In India explicitly the first annual report on ‘The Carbon footprints of Indian aviation’ presented by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) shows a 6 per cent increase in Carbon dioxide level in the year 2011. This report is a part of the strategy of developing a sustainable aviation framework for the fast growing Indian aviation sector. According to the report, combined operations from both the Indian domestic and International scheduled operations accounted for about 13 million tonnes of CO2 in 2011, which shows a 6 per cent increase in comparison to 2010. This clearly depicts that although the Indian aviation market is a booming sector for the country’s development, yet it is inevitably posing a lot of environmental challenges to be taken up with emissions getting more than doubled to 27 million by 2020. The reliability on aviation and the environmental impact are becoming critical issues for the future of flights. Therefore in order to reduce the harmful effects of emissions on our environment, there is an urgent need to develop a sustainable aviation strategy. Environmental impact assessment both at the global as well as local level needs to be addressed while thinking globally and acting locally. Thus global initiatives must match with the local level actions while minimizing disturbance levels from flight tests, optimising energy and environmental performance of production facilities and buildings. In India, a real framework for environmental impact assessment does not exist except for the Aviation Environmental Unit proposed by the DGCA, which too has a limited capacity. ICAO on the other hand has itself failed on a global framework on emission reduction. So, these lapses need to be looked upon and further emission mitigation measures need to be studied, highlighting this area of research for the sustainable development of our environment and further analysing how technology induced crises can be overcome by technology itself. This is the focus of this proposed paper