Rapid Decarbonization Prospects for the German Military Aviation Sector

While recent research has started to reveal the scale of military emissions, there has been only limited insights into if, how, and how quickly militaries and the industries that supply them can be decarbonized.

This project takes a single aspect of military decarbonization – military aviation – and empirically investigate the prospects and challenges for decarbonizing it in the German context through an expert survey approach. Aviation is important because it accounts for a large percentage of emissions from military operations – 70 percent in the United States – and there is no clear path to complete decarbonization of the aviation sector. There are options, however, to reduce emissions such as sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) and adopting fuel saving technologies, which militaries at least rhetorically support. Furthermore, unlike with other aspects of military production, Germany maintains a large industry focused on producing both civilian and military planes, which will allow us to investigate potential synergies and trade-offs between civilian and military options for decarbonizing aviation.

Our guiding research questions are: What are the barriers to decarbonizing military aviation? Do they primarily arise from combat readiness, cost concerns, political constrains, military logistical practices, or something else? Furthermore, we will investigate if and why technologies being used to reduce emissions from civilian aviation are being adopted to reduce military emissions. The scope of the analysis includes efforts to reduce emissions in the production of aircraft, make military aviation less emissions intensive through fuel saving or fuel switching, and fulfil military objectives using less aviation. Ideas for reducing military emissions by adopting an alternative grand strategy for Germany are important, but beyond the scope of this analysis.

Image: Image: An Airbus A400M and two Tornado fighter jets belonging to the German Armed Forces. Copyright: Bernardo Fernandez Copado via Flickr CC BY 2.0.