Cutting planet-warming pollution to near-zero will take more than inventing new clean technologies—it will require changing how the world invests in them. That's especially true for industries like aviation, where developing and adopting greener solutions is risky and expensive, according to a University of California San Diego commentary piece in Science.
The paper calls for smarter ways of managing investment risk could help speed up the shift toward cleaner air travel and other hard-to-decarbonize sectors.
"The aviation sector—a fast-growing source of greenhouse gases—illustrates the broader challenge of industrial decarbonization: too little investment in technologies that could yield the biggest climate benefits," said the paper's coauthor David G. Victor , professor of innovation and public policy at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy and co-director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative .
The piece outlines a new approach that could help guide a coalition of research and development (R&D) programs alongside investors and airlines seeking to deploy new technologies to curb carbon emission from the aviation industry. "Despite all the chaos in global geopolitics and climate policies these days, there are large and growing pools of capital willing to take risks on clean technology," Victor said. "What's been missing is a framework to guide that capital to the riskiest but most transformative investments."
He added that investors and research managers tend to focus on familiar, lower-risk projects like next-generation jet engines or recycled-fuel pathways. " But getting aviation and other hard-to-abate sectors to near-zero emissions means taking on bigger risks with technologies and new lines of business that will be highly disruptive to the existing industry. Investors and airlines need to find smarter ways to encourage and manage these disruptive investments," Victor said.
In the article, Victor and co-authors call for a more realistic framework to guide both research funding and private investment.
They propose a tool called an Aviation Sustainability Index (ASI)—a quantitative method to assess how different technologies or investments could help decouple emissions from growth in air travel. The approach is designed to help investors distinguish between projects that only modestly improve efficiency and those that could significantly transform the sector's climate impact.
The authors note that while roughly $1 trillion is expected to flow into aviation over the next decade, most of that money will simply make aircraft slightly more efficient. Few investors, they argue, have clear incentives to back the kind of breakthrough technologies—such as hydrogen propulsion, advanced aircraft designs, or large-scale sustainable fuel systems—that could substantially reduce emissions.
"Cleaner flight is possible, but it requires changing how we think about both risk and return," Victor said. "We need new institutions, incentives, and partnerships that reward innovation, not just incrementalism."
The commentary, written by a multinational team of scholars, also highlights a broader lesson for climate policy: global decarbonization goals such as "net zero by 2050" sound bold and ambitious. But when it becomes clear that they can't be met these goals make it harder to focus on the practical steps needed today to drive change in real-world markets.
Ultimately, the paper argues for action that begins now. By developing better tools to evaluate climate-friendly investments and by rewarding companies willing to take calculated risks on breakthrough technologies, governments, investors and industry leaders can accelerate real progress toward decarbonization.
The paper was co-authored by Thomas Conlon of University College Dublin, Philipp Goedeking of Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (Germany) and Andreas W. Schäfer of University College London.
