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On 13 March, Smart Freight Centre (SFC) and IATA announced a partnership to provide accurate and transparent CO2 emissions calculations for air cargo shipments.

The two organisations will focus efforts on developing the cargo component of IATA’s CO2 Connect, currently only available for passengers. The IATA CO2 Connect platform uses primary industry data to power highly accurate carbon calculations and, with the collaboration of the SFC Clean Air Transport Program, will promote a common methodology in CO2 emission calculations to ensure accurate and consistent CO2 calculations. This will support shippers and freight forwarders in air cargo with pre-shipment and reporting purposes.

Andrea Schoen, Director of the Clean Air Transport program, Smart Freight Centre reacted in SFC’s press release announcing the partnership: "A key milestone has been reached and this has been a long time in the making. The need for unified emissions data is stronger than ever and this milestone will enable cargo transport service purchasers to make well-founded, long-term decisions. Transparency is key to drive decarbonization investments and activities, encouraging collaborative and synergetic action throughout the value chain. Our partnership with IATA will enable effective collaboration by building trust and exchanging information across the value chain which, in turn, will help in accelerating our ongoing efforts in decarbonizing the aviation industry."

IATA and SFC are working with Kuehne+Nagel as a pilot customer for IATA CO2 Connect for Cargo to ensure that the tool meets the needs and requirements of freight forwarders and their customers. 

IATA CO2 Connect for Cargo is planned to be available as of Q4 2024. It considers airline specific fuel burn from both full freighter and passenger aircraft carrying belly cargo, airline specific cargo load factors, and passenger load factors to determine the correct ratio to attribute to belly cargo. That CO2 data output provided will be aligned with the IATA Recommended Practice 1678, plus we will provide further outputs considering well-to-wake (WTW), CO2e and CO2/tonne-km to meet requirements from shippers reporting in those metrics.

Source: Smart Freight Centre