The United Nations has ratified an agreement to curb the aircraft emissions, the first such pact to set worldwide limits on a single industry. The pact, adopted by 191 nations, sets the countries’ airline emission in 2020 as their ‘allowed discharge’ limit. Airlines which will emit in excess will have to buy carbon credits to compensate for the discharge.

• The United Nations’ aviation arm ratified an agreement to control global warming emissions from international airline flights, the first climate-change pact to set worldwide limits on a single industry.
• The agreement, adopted by the 191-nation International Civil Aviation Organization at a meeting in Montreal, sets airlines’ carbon emissions in the year 2020 as the upper limit of what carriers are allowed to discharge.
• Airlines that exceed that limit in future years, as most are expected to do, will have to offset their emissions growth by buying credits from other industries and projects that limit greenhouse gas emissions.
• Countries must still act on their own to put the agreement’s limits into effect. Adoption of the aviation agreement comes one day after the number of countries signing onto a landmark climate-change accord reached in Paris last December passed the threshold for implementing the accord.
• Secretary of State John Kerry called the aviation agreement “unprecedented” and said it builds on more than a decade of work by the U.S. and other nations to reduce aircraft emissions.