A win-win approach to air travel security
ICAO’s new global aviation plan is a step forward, Fang Liu says.
Every 24 hours, some 10 million travellers are carried on just over 100,000 flights, and these volumes are forecast to double in just 15 years’ time.
Aircraft also carry more than half of the world’s
1.4 billion tourists to their destinations annually.
With the importance of aviation’s connections to economic growth becoming better appreciated, it’s critical to our sector that any efforts to make aviation security more robust in the face of the continuing threat from terrorists do not come at the expense of traveller or shipper convenience and these important socio-economic benefits.
To help assure this, the United Nations agency for civil aviation, ICAO, headquartered in Montreal, has been working to bring together states and industry to develop win-win approaches to our aviation security and passenger-facilitation challenges.
Together we have made tremendous progress in recent years in developing new standards and approaches that focus screening procedures and resources on higher risk travellers, permit improved information sharing, coordinate global preparedness for new cyber threats, raise awareness on pre-checkpoint airport vulnerabilities and address further threats relating to explosives concealed in cargo shipments.
All of these efforts require that the many agencies and organizations that strive to keep us secure must work more effectively together.
The 2016 Istanbul and Brussels airport attacks, for example, have highlighted the benefits of local, national and international security officials having a more detailed understanding of their respective roles and responsibilities in periods of emergency.
This level of co-operation is fortunately nothing new to international aviation, and last Friday, ICAO’s 36-state governing council adopted the very first Global Aviation Security Plan to help address these issues. Central to this document is the commitment by governments and industry to achieve ambitious global aviation security-related goals and targets based on agreed timelines — all of which are set out in a comprehensive roadmap. This new strategic resource has benefitted from extensive inputs on behalf of both governments and industry, and its objectives very closely support Security Council Resolution 2309, which called for world governments to pursue closer international collaboration to ensure the safety of global air services and to help prevent terrorist attacks.
Resolution 2309 was adopted in September 2016.
The Security Council has also called upon UN member countries to work through ICAO to ensure that international security standards are reviewed and implemented based on current threat and risk assessments, and that they remain fully consistent with the Chicago Convention, which governs international civil aviation.
While Security Council members recognized that civil aviation remains an attractive target for terrorists, I was also very encouraged that their resolution referenced how secure air services are essential to our contemporary expectations for mobility, connectivity, trade and cultural exchange.
ICAO has been doing a great deal to stress this point to governments in recent years, and especially since they adopted the UN Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. Safe and secure aviation connectivity is critical to states’ attainment of 15 of these 17 visionary goals, and much more awareness is needed globally to help ensure our sector garners sufficient infrastructure investments so that societies are better prepared to optimize their aviation benefits.
Our new Global Aviation Security Plan will help states, airlines, airports and local and security stakeholders to work better together in the years ahead, and it also serves as an important complement to such existing ICAO security tools as our regularly updated Global Risk Context Statement.
In line with its contribution to the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy of the United Nations, ICAO will continue to coordinate with the Security Council and other UN bodies on all priorities relevant to aviation and border security, and to bring together the private and public sector partners who help ensure our network remains at the dependable service of societies and economies, wherever aircraft fly.