Optulence tax: Private planes and luxury flights, paid by two of the largest European countries
Business aircraft flying over Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg airport on France, May 6, 2025. Photo: Joeran Steinsiek / Imago Stock and People / Profimedia
A group of countries, including France, Kenya, Spain and Barbados, committed themselves to tax premium flights and private aircraft on Monday, trying to raise funds for climate and sustainable development, reports Reuters.
In the context in which many rich countries reduce the official development aid granted to other states, even if extreme weather phenomena become more and more severe, some of them seek new sources of financing, including by taxing polluting industries.
The announcement made on the first day of the UN Development Summit organized in Sevilla, Spain, was one of the first results of the “Sevilla Action Platform”, which aims to implement the renewed global financial framework agreed before the event.
“The objective is to contribute to the improvement of the” green “taxation and to promote the international solidarity by promoting more progressive and harmonized tax systems,” the press office of the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said in a statement.
The initiative, which was co-emptable by Sierra Leone, Benin, Antigua and Barbuda and Somalia, will benefit from technical support from the European Commission, the working group for global solidarity fees announced, in a separate statement.
The initiative was launched in November 2023, to explore new forms of taxation that could help support the efforts of developing countries regarding the decarbonization and to help them protect against the impact of climate change.
In addition to the aviation tax, which could generate billions of dollars, the working group said, in a recent report, that other sectors that could be taxed include shipping, oil and gas, cryptocurrencies and extremely rich people.
“Many of the ideas are not new, as different countries have already applied such taxes,” said Kenyi President William Ruto.
“What we need here is the political will. We cannot continue to talk about change without putting it in practice. The world follows us and awaits concrete results,” Ruto added.
Rebecca Newsom, a member of the Greenpeace ecological group, has qualified this measure as “an important step to ensure that the excessive users of this insufficient taxed sector are obliged to pay the part that returns to them.”
She added that the next “obvious” step is the responsibility of the oil companies and in the field of natural gas.
