Post updated Oct 2026
Decarbonising aviation is a huge challenge, and the industry is currently investing a lot of money and innovation into addressing it.
So will new technological developments bring aviation emissions down?
Here’s a brief run-down of some of the developments on the horizon.
Electric flight – innovation
Electrifying our transport is an established way of reducing emissions, as we’ve seen on the roads. Electric planes work in much the same way as electric cars, with batteries powering motors which turn propellors or turbos.
Electric flight has been in development for some time, with the first commercial prototype unveiled at the Paris Air Show in 2019 and companies including Rolls Royce, Heart Aerospace and ZeroAvia working on electric engines and planes.
The technology works: a 30-seat electric aircraft completed a successful test flight in August 2026. Electrification will go a long way to reducing emissions and noise.
Electric flight – challenges
Capacity and range
Batteries, the main source of power for electric aircraft, are heavy, and they don’t get lighter the further you travel, unlike fuel tanks. They also take up a lot of space, which means that electric planes can carry far fewer passengers than current aircraft. For example, the plane that was tested at the Paris Air Show in 2019 carried just nine passengers.
Using batteries also limits the range the aircraft can travel – around 1000km at the moment. That’s roughly the distance from Exeter to Inverness.
So while electric planes could play a central role in decarbonising our domestic air travel and short-haul trips to Europe, they are unlikely to ever be suitable for long-haul journeys.
Flights would only be ‘carbon neutral’ if the electricity comes from renewable sources
In 2026, just over half of the UK’s electricity was generated using renewables. While this is promising progress, there are lots of things competing for that energy, for example, our homes, factories and transport, and as we adopt more low-carbon measures in our lives, such as heat pumps and electric cars, the demand for renewables will only rise.
This begs the question of whether using renewables for aviation is the best use of an already in-demand power source, especially when planes require a much greater input of power and electricity than other uses. We believe that the priority for renewables should be decarbonising the grid and electrifying the road fleet, with aviation right at the bottom of the list.
Electric transportation is not without environmental and human cost
Significant resources are required to make batteries, and the sourcing of materials often involving human rights abuses and child exploitation. This doesn’t just apply to aviation, but we need to consider if electrifying everything is the right answer to our environmental challenges, because of its wider impacts.
Of course, this is nowhere near as high as the resources (and human rights abuses) used for fossil fuel extraction, but is still an important consideration.
So is electric flight the answer?
Electric planes will certainly have a role to play in the decarbonisation of aviation, and lots of exciting and promising developments are currently happening.
But we need to be realistic: electric flight won’t replace the majority of flights we currently take, at the rate we take them. It could well be a solution to short-hop flights such as those between the UK mainland and the islands, or more difficult domestic routes that don’t have a direct rail link. We could also see them connecting the UK to locations in Europe that are not easily connected by other means.
But they will never be suitable for large-scale commercial aviation, and they should always go hand in hand with an overall reduction in how much we fly, because of other, arguably more important, demands for renewable energy.
Hydrogen planes – innovation
There are two ways to use hydrogen to power planes: the first works like conventional aircraft, but instead of burning jet fuel, the engines burn hydrogen to produce thrust.
The other is to use a hydrogen fuel cell that reacts hydrogen with air and produces water and electricity, which then drives motors to drive the propellers.
Hydrogen is often cited as the most promising way of creating genuinely zero-emissions flight, as there’s no carbon involved in the combustion process. With hydrogen fuel cells, the only by-product is water, and with hydrogen combustion, there’s just a small amount of NOx.
Hydrogen planes – challenges
Storage and design
The problem with hydrogen is the storage of it. Hydrogen is a gas, so it needs to be compressed and cooled to incredibly low temperatures in order to use it to fuel a plane. That involves putting it in a very complicated storage tank, which wouldn’t fit in a conventional aircraft.
Conventionally, jet fuel is stored in the wings, but hydrogen cylinders are larger and more bulky, taking up four times the volume of jet fuel, as well as needing to be kept at -250ºC.
This means planes need to be completely redesigned in order to run on hydrogen, which will take a lot of time and cost a lot of money, so we’re looking at multiple decades before we see large-scale hydrogen aircraft.
Fuel efficiency – innovation and challenges
Airlines and policy-makers often point out that aircraft engines are much more fuel-efficient than they used to be, therefore emissions per passenger have decreased substantially over the years.
That’s true. Modern aircraft are around 80% more fuel-efficient than the first commercial airliners introduced in the 1960s, and they are getting more efficient all the time: the Boeing 777X reduces fuel burn by 15% compared its predecessor, the 777-300.
Efficiency gains such as improved design and technology, larger planes that can carry more passengers, and a higher load factor, mean that emissions per-passenger more than halved between 1990 and 2019.
The trouble is, in that time, demand has quadrupled. In 1990, airlines carried 1.2 billion passengers globally. By 2019, that figure was 4.56 billion.
It takes roughly 15 years for new aircraft designs to come into commercial use and in that time, growth in demand will likely have outstripped any efficiency gains.
Global CO2 emissions from aviation have quadrupled since the 1960s. Emissions from aviation are still rising, despite new technology.
Technology has its place, and brilliant engineers and scientists are working on genuine zero-carbon solutions.
But none of these will be a solution for our current flying habits.
Electric planes can’t replace the volume and distance of today’s planes. Hydrogen is still decades away. Efficiency gains only count if demand stays the same or reduces.
There are simply not enough resources to decarbonise current levels of aviation, especially as those resources would be better used elsewhere.
Our priority should be reducing the amount we fly – and using technology to decarbonise the flights that remain.
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