In 1944 the Chicago Convention set out the foundations of public international law regulating international air transport, but until 2016 no international agreement existed to limit its environmental impact. Sustainable Development, International Aviation, and Treaty Implementation explains why the CORSIA scheme, adopted by the International Civil Aviation Organization in 2016, should be implemented in 2020 even though the adequacy of this scheme is still open to doubt and criticism. This book seeks to examine the many dimensions of the effort to contain greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft in a manner consonant with the principles of sustainable development, and examines the development of international law and policy in an area that has remained largely outside the general framework of international environmental law. International civil aviation is a significant polluter of the atmosphere, and in this volume, a group of air law and sustainable development law specialists considers how the international community can respond.

A significant volume of literature already exists concerning the inclusion of aviation in the EU-ETS. Most of the research laid its focus on specific industry levels such as the individual airline, the aviation industry in general or macroeconomic aspects. In this context, these studies tried to anticipate market reactions triggered by the EU-ETS by analyzing specific issues such as the financial impact on airlines, changes in competitive behavior or implications for the overall industry development. As a consequence, the existing studies took only a limited market view and made assumptions about expected developments in specific fields of the aviation industry. However, at the time of writing this thesis, conclusions about the scope of impact could hardly be drawn from existing impact assessments because of the wide range of issues that exceeded the scope of most impact studies. Hence, a broader research approach is needed which takes different analytical perspectives to describe the scope of impact of the EU-ETS and depict potential effects for the aviation industry.