We are, of course, no exception. We report to the UK’s Environment Agency for the EU ETS compliance.

With the objective of managing the consumption and cost of fuel use, we already had a system in place that tracks fuel consumption from an accounting standpoint. Meeting the EU ETS’ requirement of monitoring carbon emission involved the task of extending this functionality and fine tuning the fuel data collection to focus only on the specific relevant routes on the network, the aircrafts used, and the passenger and cargo loads of these flights. Processes of how these measurements were collected and the integrity and accuracy of its data were also shared with the UK agency. This involved revisiting the processes that were already in place that support the fuel management system, converting these into the appropriate units and re-documenting these for complying with ETS’ requirements.

More info on our ETS-related activities and compliance over time

The debate over this legislation has been taken so seriously that the opposition party, the Liberal Party, has even had a change in leadership- just today a new leader has already been appointed.

China and India have also announced that they will be attending this month’s Copenhagen talks. Hopefully there will be an agreement in the outcome of this much anticipated event.

In choosing my words carefully, it is “good” to see this issue being taken so seriously by a government. I will continue watching keenly the developments on this front.

For continuous updates on the Australian government’s development on the ETS, one of the sources I follow is Sky News’ twitter updates.

John Low
MAS Environment department