
The implementation of Europe’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) has begun amid widespread confusion on the part of the aircraft operators who stand subject to it and the government bodies responsible for running it. August 31 was supposed to have been the deadline by which operators had to register their plans for monitoring, reporting and verifying (MRV) carbon dioxide emissions from their fleet. However, despite the fact that ETS has undergone development for several years, it took the European Commission until
August 22 to publish a full list of operators subject to ETS and the list of national agencies in each of the 27 European Union states to which each individual operator must submit their plans.
The delay in publishing the list of operators prompted the UK’s Environment Agency to
suspend the August 31 deadline, and its German counterpart soon did the same. However, other EU states have not publicly given the operators assigned to them more time to file MRV plans, leaving them scrambling to complete the paperwork in barely a week.