Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, global air transport demand was expected to triple between 2020 and 2050. The pandemic, which reduced global air travel significantly, provides an opportunity to discuss the scale, distribution and growth of aviation until 2018, also with a view to consider the climate change implications of a return to volume growth. Industry statistics, data provided by supranational organizations, and national surveys are evaluated to develop a pre-pandemic understanding of air transport demand at global, regional, national and individual scales. Results suggest that the share of the world’s population travelling by air in 2018 was 11%, with at most 4% taking international flights. Data also supports that a minor share of air travelers is responsible for a large share of warming: The percentile of the most frequent fliers – at most 1% of the world population - likely accounts for more than half of the total emissions from passenger air travel. Individual users of private aircraft can contribute to emissions of up to 7,500 t CO₂ per year. Findings are specifically relevant with regard to the insight that a large share of global aviation emissions is not covered by policy agreements.

Within the framework of a standard discounted value model, we examine whether a number of macroeconomic variables influence stock prices in the US and Japan. A cointegration analysis is applied in order to model the long-term relationship between industrial production, the consumer price index, money supply, long-term interest rates and stock prices in the US and Japan. For the US, we find the data are consistent with a single cointegrating vector, where stock prices are positively related to industrial production and negatively related to both the consumer price index and the long-term interest rate. We also find an insignificant (although positive) relationship between the US stock prices and the money supply. However, for the Japanese data, we find two cointegrating vectors. We find for one vector that stock prices are influenced positively by industrial production and negatively by the money supply. For the second cointegrating vector, we find industrial production to be negatively influenced by the consumer price index and a long-term interest rate. These contrasting results may be due to the slump in the Japanese economy during the 1990s and consequent liquidity trap.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented decline in global air transport and associated reduction in CO₂ emissions. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) reacted by weakening its own CO₂-offsetting rules. Here we investigate whether the pandemic can be an opportunity to bring the sector on a reliable low-carbon trajectory, with a starting point in the observed reduction in air transport demand. We model a COVID-19 recovery based on a feed-in quota for non-biogenic synthetic fuels that will decarbonize fuels by 2050, as well as a carbon price to account for negative externalities and as an incentive to increase fuel efficiency. Results suggest that until 2050, air transport demand will continue to grow, albeit slower than in ICAO’s recovery scenarios, exceeding 2018 demand by 3.7–10.3 trillion RPK. Results show that synthetic fuels, produced by 14–20 EJ of photovoltaic energy, would make it possible to completely phase out fossil fuels and to avoid emissions of up to 26.5 Gt CO₂ over the period 2022–2050.