The International Civil Aviation Organization on Feb. 15 issued a press release sketching the outlines of what was decided at two-week-long environmental committee meeting, but providing few details.
The vagueness is consistent with ICAO’s weak access to information policies. The committee meeting was conducted behind closed doors and no documents are made public before or after. (See EYE report on ICAO transparency.)
Arguably, the complexity of the subjects tackled by ICAO’s Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection (CAEP) makes summarization of the Feb. 4-15 proceedings difficult. But anyone seeking to learn more about the conclusions described in the 17-paragraph press release has no place to turn to learn more.
The lack of verifiability facilitates ICAO editorializing about the outcome, which the international body lauded as a “significant step forward.”
An agreed-on new standard for the emissions of non-volatile particulate matter from aircraft engines “will minimize” the potential environmental and health impacts of particulates, according to the press release.
The ICOA does not define what emissions limit was chosen.
“Minimize,” may be an exaggeration, several sources told Eyeonglobaltransparency.net, saying that that the committee picked a standard in the lower range of the options presented.
Evaluating the ICAO’s assessment is difficult in the absence of documents.
The committee’s recommendations now go to the ICAO Council, where again no documents will be available before the closed Council meetings. The Council will release the recommendations it accepts.
Eventually there will be minutes of the just-completed environmental committee session, but an ICAO official declined to say when they will be available. In any event, ICAOs sells the minutes. The price tag for those of the last meeting was $452.
The ICAO press release covered other topics in broad strokes. The section on alternative fuels, a key topic of the meeting, says a package of agreements was reached that will provide “clarity” for the energy sector.
Parties to the negotiations, including accredited observers from industry and environmental groups, said little about the outcome. They are bound by confidentiality rules that restrict them from disclosing details of the deliberations, particularly any information about what other participants said.
One notable exception from the post-meeting silence was a press release from the International Council on Clean Transportation that describes how CAEP handled another item on its (unpublished) agenda: what type of noise standards should apply to supersonic aircraft.
The ICCT reported: “Overall, ICAO declined to establish an international landing and takeoff (LTO) noise standard specific to supersonic aircraft (the first approach). Instead, it will conduct a comprehensive review of the likely increased noise, air, and climate pollution from supersonics and consider how the existing (Chapter 14 in UN parlance, Stage 5 in the U.S.) LTO noise requirements for subsonic aircraft can be applied to supersonics.” The group recently modeled the impacts of an increase in SST flights.
The ICAO press release said, “CAEP also considered the progress that has been achieved towards supersonic transport operations, and agreed that an exploratory study should be undertaken.”
In some instances, to understand the described CAEP outcomes would take research to develop context. For example, the press release states:
“The meeting also delivered new technology goals for the sector, including improvements of aircraft noise up to 15.5 dB below Chapter 14 limits for single-aisle aircraft by 2027, NOx emission by 54 per cent relative to the latest ICAO NOx SARPs and fuel efficiency up to 1.3 per cent per annum can be expected for the new aircraft entering into production.”
According to the press release, the meeting was attended by 250 experts. However, the official list of attendees released by ICAO showed a total of 185. (See EYE story.)
Perhaps predictably, there has been virtually no press coverage of the CAEP meeting, at least as far as multiple Google searches could determine. Only three stories surfaced, all basically identical to the press release.
