Vijay Poonoosamy , vice president international & public affairs at Etihad, said he had sent a note outlining the merits of the scheme to Matthew Baldwin, director of Aviation and International Affairs at the EC, during this week’s Singapore’s Airshow and was confident there was a “window of opportunity” that it could be formally adopted by ICAO the end of 2012.
“By the end of the year we could have a proposal on the table and then we can go to an extraordinary meeting of ICAO,” he told Routes News.
A global scheme, which has been endorsed in theory by ICAO and IATA, would help take some of the poison out of the current row over the EU ETS, he Poonoosamy said, and would help airlines meet their agreed target of halving emissions by 2020.
“If half the energy used to oppose the EU ETS was used to build an ICAO framework this could really begin to move forward, its really down to the governments how they react,” he added.
Meanwhile, government officials from 27 countries, including the US and China, are due to meet in Moscow on February 21 to discuss possible retaliatory measures against the EU over the inclusion of airlines in the ETS.
New taxes and charges on European airlines, as well as the re-opening of bilateral treaties governing flight rights will be considered at the two-day meeting, Reuters reported.