Near-airport distribution of the environmental costs of aviation

Aircraft noise, air quality, and climate change damages are spatially and temporally heterogeneous. While policymakers often focus on aggregate cost-benefit analysis to examine tradeoffs in aviation environmental policy, these analyses do not always indicate who bears the costs or who gains the benefits of aviation. We model both the net cost and distribution of environmental damages from one year of aviation operations across the three environmental domains. We find that populations living at airport boundaries face damages of $100–400 per person per year from aircraft noise and between $5–16 per person per year from climate damages (in 2006 dollars). Expected damages from air quality are dependent on the number of operations at the airport and range from $20 to over $400 per person per year with air quality damages approaching those of noise at high volume airports. Mean expected noise and air quality damages decay with distance from the airport, but for noise, the range of expected damages at a given distance can be high and depends on orientation with respect to runways and flight patterns. Damages from aviation-induced climate change dominate those from local air quality degradation and noise pollution further away from the airport. However, air quality damages may exceed those from climate when considering the impact of cruise emissions on air quality.