Speaking at the 72nd Annual General Meeting of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) in Dublin today, ICAO Council President Dr. Olumuyiwa Benard Aliu highlighted that a key element of the UN agency"™s ongoing carbon emission mitigation strategy should be adopted by its Member States at the 39th ICAO Assembly this September.
"With respect to our shared objectives on aviation"™s environmental performance, our common goal is to respond to the needs of civil society for safe and environmentally sustainable air travel, now and for the coming generations," Dr. Aliu remarked to the assembled IATA airline CEOs. "We continue to make progress on all elements in our basket of measures to reduce aviation emissions and their impact on climate change, and I still firmly believe that the political will exists to realize a global market-based measure (MBM) solution at our 39th Assembly to complement these measures."
In addition to agreeing to the proposed Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA), the ICAO Assembly is also expected to agree on the respective work required on behalf of ICAO, its States, and industry, in order for the scheme to be fully operational by 2020. This includes the establishment of registries, the determination of the monitoring review and verification (MRV) requirements, and emissions unit criteria (EUC).
"ICAO"™s Member States have agreed to continue their consultations over the summer, in order to seek greater consensus and ensure the adoption of the global MBM Resolution at the Assembly," Dr. Aliu said. "As always, our sector has relied on its historic strengths "“ cooperation and consensus "“ to reach this point, and we will need to preserve our highest respect for those values in the months ahead if we are to avoid an acrimonious and inefficient patchwork of local emissions regimes," he declared.
The address also touched on ICAO"™s work relating to several other important issues concerning international civil aviation, in particular with regard to safety, air navigation efficiency, and security.
"The recent terrorist incident at Brussels Airport and the loss of EgyptAir flight 804 have brought forward renewed concerns on a number of safety and security challenges, for instance the better location finding of downed aircraft and the quick recovery of black boxes, landside security at airport facilities, insider threats, and improved risk management approaches," Dr. Aliu noted.
Other highlights from the ICAO Council President"™s keynote address included updates on the ICAO Global Aeronautical Distress and Safety System (GADSS) concept of operations, which sets out global aviation"™s actions to avoid future aircraft disappearances, new updates to the UN agency"™s Global Plans for aviation safety and air navigation, the likelihood of the Assembly agreeing that ICAO should develop a new Global Aviation Security Plan (GASeP), and various air navigation developments relating to the ICAO Aviation System Block Upgrade Modules and the sector"™s evolution toward System-wide Information Management (SWIM).
