MIME - Market-based Impact Mitigation for the Environment

Airlines and airports face an increasing number of noise-impact constraints in the future. There are already a large number of airports worldwide with some type of noise surcharges, and air-transport industry faces noise-related environmental constraints on future growth. In other industries, there are conditions under which a market-based mechanism with transferable permits can be used to provide improved control over environmental impacts, and at the same time, allow efficient business operations. The research project MIME, financed under EU FP6, is aimed at discovering whether, and how, such mechanisms can be used to improve environmental noise control in air transport, especially at airports that have limited capacity due to noise constraints. MIME studies the feasibility of ways to enhance the environmental performance of the air-transportation system by employing market-based methods addressing noise control. These methods are innovative in that they bring an entirely new paradigm to bear on the control of noise around airports. The paper will focus on methods to transfer noise annoyance into tradable permits.