An Aviation Carbon Offset Scheme (ACOS) | Umweltbundesamt

This paper provides a concept for the design of the Aviation Carbon Offset Scheme (ACOS) and aims at overcoming the deadlock that has continued for many years between developed and developing countries, hindering an agreement on instruments addressing greenhouse gas emission of the aviation sectors. We discuss key design options of such a scheme, including which entity should be responsible for purchasing offsets, how requirements for purchasing offsets can be divided between the covered entities, how the diverging situations of countries can be taken into account without providing incentives to evade the scheme and what needs to be considered to ensure environmental integrity. As a result we sketch out a scheme covering all countries, which takes into account differences them by means of a route-based differentiation of requirements, which does not generate any revenues and which would enable the aviation sector to contribute appropriately to the global challenge of addressing climate change.