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The climate opportunities and risks of contrail avoidance
Jessie R Smith1, Carla Grobler2, Paul J Hodgson3
1Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, UK. jrs201@cam.ac.uk.
Nature Communications
|January 28, 2026
Summary
Implementing navigational contrail avoidance can significantly reduce aviation
Area of Science:
- Climate Science
- Aviation Impacts
- Atmospheric Chemistry
Background:
- Aviation contributes to global warming through CO2 emissions and contrail formation.
- Contrail warming is a significant, yet often overlooked, component of aviation's climate impact.
- Effective strategies are needed to mitigate aviation's climate footprint.
Purpose of the Study:
- To quantify the global temperature changes from contrail avoidance strategies by 2050.
- To assess the impact of delayed implementation of contrail avoidance measures.
- To compare the climate benefits of contrail avoidance with the warming from additional CO2 emissions.
Main Methods:
- Utilized the Aviation Climate and Air Quality Impacts (ACQI) model.
- Simulated global temperature changes under various contrail avoidance scenarios.
- Projected impacts towards the year 2050.
Main Results:
- Without avoidance, aviation is projected to cause 0.040 K CO2 warming and 0.054 K contrail warming by 2050.
- A phased avoidance strategy (2035-2045) could recover 9% of the remaining global temperature budget.
- Delaying avoidance by 10 years reduces potential budget recovery to 2%, with each year of delay increasing 2050 temperatures by 0.003 K.
Conclusions:
- Navigational contrail avoidance offers a substantial opportunity to reduce aviation-attributable warming.
- Inaction on contrail avoidance poses the most significant climate risk.
- The climate benefits of contrail avoidance far outweigh the warming from any additional CO2 emissions during implementation.
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