ATW Daily News

Arab carriers, SITA join forces to negotiate EU emissions trading

Thursday July 2, 2009

Eleven member airlines of the Arab Air Carriers Org. will be the first users of SITA's new Aircraft Emissions Manager when the solution becomes available commercially in October, AACO and SITA revealed yesterday at the latter's Air Transport IT Summit in Cannes.

AACO also agreed on behalf of the 11 participating members (EgyptAir, Oman Air, Royal Jordanian, Saudi Arabian Airlines, Syrian Arab Airways, Air Cairo, Jordan Aviation, Kuwait Airways, Libyan Airlines, Middle East Airlines and Yemenia Yemen Airways) that SITA will supply advisory services to help manage what they call the EU emissions trading scheme "challenge."

By Aug. 31, all airlines operating to, from and within the EU must submit their plan on how they will monitor and report carbon dioxide emissions to their assigned EU member state in advance of a pre-monitoring phase in 2010. The effective cap-and-trade starts in 2012.

"SITA is already providing our members with consultancy services to prepare their monitoring plans, which means we are assured of an end-to-end service," AACO Secretary General Abdul Wahab Teffaha said. "The EU ETS is a very aggressive plan for airlines that never had to do something like this before," he told ATWOnline, adding that AACO contacted six companies to try to educate and help prepare its members for aviation's inclusion in the ETS.

"It became quickly clear to us that SITA had an edge over everybody else, and they were selected unanimously. Penalties [for a late filing of the monitoring pan as well as reporting incorrect data] are extremely high. We are certain that the SITA solution will allow our member airlines to provide 100% accurate data on our carbon emissions to the EU so we get a fair deal under the ETS from 2012 onwards."

SITA CEO Francesco Violante refrained from detailing how many other airlines he hoped to sign up for AEM but said there is a clear "need for a community approach to accurate reporting of carbon emissions and we have developed a solution that is suitable for deployment in every region." SITA currently is in discussion with airline organizations in other regions and is in direct talks with several carriers, Head of Environment Program Frederic Falise told this website.

by Cathy Buyck

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