Opportunities for Turkey under CORSIA

Following the adoption of the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) in 2016, the MidSEFF carbon finance programme initiated discussions with the Turkish government concerning the implications this scheme could have on the domestic carbon market and the country’s contribution towards the ambitions of the Paris Agreement. To further inform these discussions and provide the Turkish government insight into the implications of using domestic carbon credits in the new post-2020 climate regime, an analysis of the opportunities of CORSIA for domestic demand for carbon credits was requested by the Ministry of Environment and Urban Planning and the Turkish Directorate General for Civil Aviation.

Countries that voluntarily decide to participate in the CORSIA may join the scheme from the beginning of a given year, and will need to notify ICAO of their decision to join by June 30 the preceding year. All Member States of ICAO, including Turkey, will be required to make appropriate changes to the national regulations to align with the CORSIA relevant Standards and Recommended Practices (SARPs). To the extent possible, the provisions of the SARPs have been written in such a way as to facilitate incorporation, without major textual changes, into national legislation.

Turkey counts more than 10 aircraft operators, of which four are purely cargo airlines and the remaining are either pure passenger airlines or service both passengers and cargo transport needs. All of these operators will be required to participate in all three phases of CORSIA and as such the complete national fuel data has been taken into account when preparing the demand calculation model for offsets over the period 2021 – 2035. This report prepared under the MidSEFF Carbon Market Development Support Programme provides insight into how existing domestic supply of carbon credits in Turkey will compare against the expected demand coming from the Turkish aviation industry. The outcome indicates that when the base case scenario supply is adjusted for the volumes of Turkish VERs already transacted, the current portfolio of projects will not be sufficient to meet the domestic demand of the Turkish airline operators that will be covered under CORSIA. As explained in the report, the total cumulative supply of available credits reaches 170 million by 2035, against the 196 million demanded by the domestic airline industry under a medium growth scenario and 402 million under a high growth scenario. It should be noted that the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic combined the ICAO Council's decision to use only 2019 emissions for the CORSIA baseline will considerably impact these projections, which have been made prior to these two events.

Figure: Timeline of CORSIA developments

Source: Climate Focus and GAIA, 2021