Aligning historical international aviation and maritime transport data to the scope of EU climate policies

The climate targets of the European Union (EU) are defined in relation to historical benchmarks: for instance, the European Climate Law requires net domestic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to be reduced by at least 55% by 2030 compared to 1990. However, for aviation and maritime transport, primary statistics on emissions are not available at the level of geographical detail needed to suitably track the contribution of international voyages to domestic emissions. To this end, this report describes a calibration methodology that harmonizes available statistics and yields an internally-consistent decomposition of 1990-2021 activity, energy use, and emissions for aviation and maritime transport in the EU and European Economic Area (EEA). The resulting dataset matches Eurostat energy balances and distinguishes intra-/extra-EU and/or intra-/extra-EEA departures for each EU Member State, each EEA country, and the United Kingdom. The dataset is therefore consistent with the scope of EU climate policies and can inform further research and decisionmaking. The dataset is included in the latest release of the Joint Research Centre's Integrated Database of the European Energy System (JRC-IDEES-2021), which is freely accessible through the JRC Data Catalogue under an open-access license.