Modeling of the Impacts of Climate Change on Aviation and Adaptation (MICCAA): impact on demand, loss and damage

JOB DESCRIPTION:

This work builds on AeroMAPS, an open-source framework for prospective air transport scenarios (Planès et al., 2023), which already models aviation emissions and an income-driven demand for revenue passenger kilometers (Costa-Alves et al., 2026). To evaluate climatic damages, several models could be considered, such as DICE, the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and Economy (Nordhaus, 1992; Barrage and Nordhaus, 2024) or the Dietz-Stern model (2015). In the specific context of air transport, Johansson et al. (2025) used a modified version of DICE to value aviation CO₂ and contrail cirrus within the same framework. Then, Burke et al. (2026) define loss and damage as the discounted damages attributable to specific emissions.

The internship transposes this logic to aviation within AeroMAPS. Aviation emissions are combined with background global emissions from the CMIP7 Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (Van Vuuren et al., 2026), as shown in Fig. 1. The global temperature increase is computed with the FaIR simple climate model (Leach et al., 2021) and non-CO2 effects (such as contrails) following Johansson et al. (2025). The damage function converts temperature into a loss of world Gross domestic product (GDP), from which loss and damages for air transport can be derived.

The damaged GDP then drives future demand in air transport, through loss in revenue passenger kilometers (RPK), which is measured against a counterfactual scenario without climatic damages. Population and GDP projections are kept identical in all runs, so that differences between scenarios result from the climatic impact alone. The share of each impact attributable to aviation is obtained by repeating each run with and without aviation emissions. Climatic damages evaluation is heavily sensitive to the parametrization of the damage function (eg elasticity of marginal utility), as shown in Stern (2007) and Hänsel et al. (2020).

This work will thus evaluate the sensitivity of results to these uncertain parameters. Finally, the internship will consider different scenarios for the global economy, such as Medium (M), High (H) and Very Low (VL) scenario pathways. For each of these global scenarios, different decarbonization scenarios will be considered for aviation from AeroMAPS. For each case, the objective is to evaluate global loss and damage, aviation-attributable loss and damage, and loss in air transport demand up to 2100.