Part 1 | Why Book and Claim Is Gaining Ground in Freight Emissions Accounting

Freight and logistics are responsible for roughly a tenth of global greenhouse gas emissions, and without stronger intervention that share is on track to grow rather than shrink. The sector is also notoriously hard to abate: low-emission fuels and assets are expensive, supply chains are sprawling and dynamic, and the actors who could pay for decarbonization are rarely the same actors who control the trucks, ships, or aircraft doing the emitting. Book and claim has emerged as one of the few mechanisms capable of bridging that gap. But a mechanism is only as good as the math behind it — and that math is where most of the real work, and most of the real risk, sits. 

This is the first of a two-part series, where we walk through what makes book and claim relevant and, why the calculation methodology behind it matters as much as the concept itself.  

Consider a company that announces it has purchased sustainable aviation fuel and therefore reduced its air freight emissions – a claim that, as we'll see, usually doesn't hold up on its own. We'll come back to why that claim falls apart, and what it takes to make it hold up, in a follow-up piece next month. 

Why Book and Claim Is Becoming Increasingly Relevant for Emissions Accounting 
Book and claim is a chain-of-custody model that separates the administrative record of an environmental characteristic — a low-emission fuel's reduced emissions profile(compared to a reference fossil fuel), for example — from the physical flow of the product itself. That separation is precisely what makes it useful in freight. A shipper rarely has any control over which truck, vessel, or aircraft physically carries its goods, and a carrier often cannot justify the cost of low-emission assets without demand and funding from further up the value chain.  

Book and claim lets a shipper or logistics service provider fund and claim the benefit of a low-emission transportation service even when their freight never physically touches the asset generating it. This decoupling logic isn't new — it underpins the market-based approach already used for renewable electricity reporting — but its application to freight has accelerated for a few converging reasons.  

Hard-to-abate transport modes (aviation, maritime, heavy road) have few scalable low-emission alternatives, so cost-sharing mechanisms matter more there than almost anywhere else.  

Scope 3 reporting pressure has intensified as companies face growing expectations from regulators, investors, and customers to show credible logistics emissions reductions, even when those emissions sit several tiers removed from their own operations. And the broader sustainability disclosure landscape — from the GHG Protocol's evolving guidance, SBTi’s Corporate Net Zero Standard 2.0 (CNZS 2.0) reporting hierarchy for market- based interventions, to the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, increasingly expects companies to substantiate claims about reduced emissions, not just assert them.  

SFC’s Market- Based Meausres (MBM) Framework translates that expectation into an auditable methodology built specifically for freight logistics, and provides guidance on how companies can apply it, provided the underlying calculation holds up. 

The Importance of Credible Calculation Methodologies in Market-Based Measures 
This is where book and claim either earns trust or loses it. The basic arithmetic is simple in concept: a shipper takes its physical transport activity, identifies a portion of it to be served by a verified low-emission transportation service, and substitutes the emission intensity of that portion accordingly. A shipper with a baseline freight volume and emission intensity can reduce its market-based total by sourcing part of that volume from a low-emission service with a lower verified intensity, then reporting the blended result. The substitution itself is straightforward arithmetic — the credibility comes from everything that has to be true before that substitution is allowed to happen. 

That is the function of a set of integrity measures that any robust market-based measures (MBM) framework builds in. Four checks make or break a claim: 
  • Mode and activity match – the claim covers the same transport mode and activity that was actually reduced. 
  • Vintage — the service was generated, booked, and claimed within a defined time window. 
  • Additionality — the reduction wouldn't have happened anyway. 
  • No double counting — no other organization is claiming the same reduction. 
In practice, how these tests are applied still varies by framework, and the line between erroneous double counting and legitimate co-claiming is one of the areas practitioners run into most often. 

Vintage rules exist precisely because ambiguity about when a low-emission service occurred can undermine the whole claim: regulations shift, methodologies get updated, and a claim booked or applied years after the fact stops reflecting current reality. ISO 22095-3, the international standard specifically addressing book and claim, reinforces this by requiring that every claim made through a book and claim system be credible, specific, reliable, relevant, clear, transparent, and accessible to its intended audience — and that recordkeeping be robust enough to prevent the same characteristic being claimed twice across parallel systems. 

None of this is academic. A calculation that skips a vintage check, misattributes a claim to the wrong transportation activity, or fails to distinguish an "emitter's" emissions from "supply chain" emissions can quietly produce a number that looks like a reduction but isn't defensible under scrutiny — by an auditor, a customer, or a regulator. Getting the calculation right is what separates book and claim from a marketing exercise. 

Take the case from the opening of this piece: a company that announces it has purchased sustainable aviation fuel and therefore reduced its air freight emissions. On paper, that looks like exactly this kind of credible claim. In practice, it usually isn't, and the reason why is specific enough to be worth its own piece. In the next article in this series, we'll walk through exactly where that claim breaks down, and what it takes to make it hold up. 

SFC's Book & Claim and Market-Based Measures training walks practitioners through exactly this kind of question: how to tell a credible claim from one that only looks credible. 

Part 2 will be published on the October 12th, 2026. 

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