Decarbonizing Canadian commercial aviation: Efficiency gains, sustainable aviation fuel, and structural limits to emissions reduction

Commercial aviation is a difficult-to-abate sector in which traffic growth can offset improvements in operational and fuel efficiency. This study evaluates the decarbonization trajectory of Canadian commercial aviation from 2015 to 2025, examining whether efficiency gains have been sufficient to counteract activity-driven emissions growth and represent a persistent structural improvement. This study analyzes eight open-government analytical datasets, supplemented by two external benchmark sources. Kaya–Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) decomposition quantifies the contributions of activity, stage length, load factor, and fuel intensity to CO 2 emissions, while trend and structural-break analyses assess changes in emissions intensity. Complementary analyses examine airport recovery, an exploratory association between occurrence-based turbofan representation and aviation incidents, and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) scenarios. Annual CO 2 intensity declined significantly over the non-pandemic period, and fuel-intensity improvements avoided approximately 2.9 Mt CO 2 between 2015 and 2019. However, activity growth added approximately 5.3 Mt CO 2 , outweighing these gains. Monthly analysis identifies a major structural disruption at the onset of COVID-19 followed by a subsequent recovery regime. Airport recovery was heterogeneous, while the safety analysis identified an exploratory negative association between occurrence-based turbofan share and incident counts. Under the SAF uptake and traffic-growth scenarios evaluated, fuel substitution alone does not fully offset projected activity-driven emissions growth through 2030. Overall, efficiency improvements have reduced Canadian aviation carbon intensity but remain insufficient to achieve sustained reductions in absolute emissions under continued traffic growth, highlighting the need to evaluate accelerated SAF deployment alongside additional mitigation measures. When the observed fuel-efficiency trend and the 5% SAF blend are evaluated jointly, however, projected 2030 emissions fall to approximately 19.8 Mt—below the 2025 level of about 20.1 Mt—so that the two levers together offset essentially the entire traffic-driven increment.