Part 2 | What Goes Wrong When Companies Implement Book and Claim, and How to Get It Right

How Book and Claim Supports Corporate Climate and Reporting Strategies 

Done well, book and claim gives companies a reporting pathway that doesn't depend on owning or directly controlling the assets that reduce emissions. This matters enormously for shippers and logistics service providers, who typically contract for transport capacity rather than operate it. By booking the verified emission profile of a low-emission transportation service and substituting it into their inventory, these companies can show genuine progress on Scope 3 freight emissions without waiting for their entire carrier network to electrify or switch fuels — something that, realistically, will take decades. 

It also gives companies a way to participate meaningfully in frameworks that increasingly expect this kind of detail: GHG Protocol guidance, sector-specific Science Based Targets initiative guidance for aviation and maritime, and disclosure regimes like the CSRD all push companies toward more granular, market-aware accounting rather than blunt physical totals.  

The emerging convention — borrowed from the Scope 2 electricity playbook — is dual reporting: a physical inventory reflecting what was actually used, alongside a market-based inventory reflecting the characteristics of instruments like book and claim units. Reporting both, rather than only the physical figure, lets a company demonstrate the commercial and contractual choices it is making to support decarbonization, even where those choices haven't yet changed what's moving through its own trucks. 

Strategically, this also reframes book and claim as a cost-sharing tool rather than just an accounting trick. It allows the organizations most willing to pay a premium for low-emission transport — often shippers and LSPs with public climate commitments — to direct that willingness-to-pay toward carriers and solution providers who need the capital to invest in cleaner fuels and assets in the first place. The claim is the mechanism that makes that capital flow worth reporting. For carriers, this turns book and claim from an accounting exercise imposed by customers into a real funding channel: verified low-emission capacity can be sold potentially to the buyer that values it most, regardless of the the non-participant customer payloads physically on that route. 

None of this sits on settled ground yet. ISO 22095 laid out the general family of chain-of-custody models — identity preserved, segregated, controlled blending, mass balance, and book and claim — and the newer Part 3 of that standard now adds book-and-claim-specific requirements, including the concept of transferable instruments with entitlement to claim (TIECs) and a residual mix calculation designed to prevent double counting where no instrument has been issued or retired. In parallel, ISO's technical committee on chain of custody is developing a dedicated, cross-sector book and claim standard intended to apply as readily to bananas and plastics as it does to freight — a sign that the model is being standardized well beyond logistics. 

 There is still no single, universally agreed method for folding market-based measures into a corporate emissions inventory, except in cases with a proven physical link, such as mass balance. Most book and claim applications rely on companies applying credible frameworks and documenting their assumptions while the formal standards catch up. 

That's not a reason to wait. It is a reason to treat today's frameworks as a credible, defensible starting point, not a finished rulebook. Expect refinement as GHG Protocol, SBTi, and ISO guidance converge over the next several years. 

Given how much nuance sits underneath a single substitution calculation, the most common failure mode in book and claim isn't bad faith — it's a shallow understanding of what a claim actually represents. A familiar example: a company announces it has purchased a large volume of sustainable aviation fuel and therefore reduced its air freight emissions. In most cases that statement doesn't hold up, because the company rarely purchases or physically uses the fuel itself; an airline does. What the company has purchased is an emission profile, tied to a defined transportation activity, that must be substituted into its inventory according to the same mode, activity, vintage, and additionality rules that govern any other claim. Conflating fuel ownership with emissions reduction is exactly the kind of statement that invites a greenwashing accusation, because it skips over the mechanics that make the claim valid in the first place. 

This is why an organization needs more than a single sustainability lead who understands book and claim — it needs shared understanding across the teams that will actually structure and communicate these claims: procurement, who negotiate the contracts; sustainability and reporting, who apply the claim to inventories and disclosures; and often legal or communications, who field questions from customers and auditors about how the number was produced. Each of these functions needs a working grasp of the roles in play — shipper, carrier, logistics service provider, solution provider — and how direct versus indirect provision, and bundled versus unbundled attribution, change who is entitled to book or claim what. Without that shared model, it's easy for one team to structure a contract that another team can't defensibly report, or for an externally facing claim to outrun what the underlying accounting can support. This is exactly the gap SFC's Book & Claim and MBM training is built to close: a shared working model across procurement, sustainability and reporting, and legal or communications, so a contract one team signs is one another team can actually defend. 

Because the surrounding standards are still evolving, organizations will also inevitably run into grey areas — situations the current frameworks don't fully resolve. Handling those well requires documenting assumptions transparently and being prepared to explain the reasoning, rather than glossing over the ambiguity. That kind of judgment only comes from genuine internal fluency with the mechanics, not from treating book and claim as an off-the-shelf purchasing decision. 

Book and claim is gaining ground because it solves a real problem: it lets capital and accountability flow to where emissions reductions are happening, even when that's several steps removed from the company making the claim. But the credibility of every claim rests entirely on the calculation behind it — the mode and activity it's tied to, the vintage window it falls within, the additionality it represents, and the assurance that no one else is claiming the same reduction. As standards from ISO, the GHG Protocol, and sector bodies like SBTi continue to mature, the organizations that get the most value from book and claim will be the ones that invested early in understanding how the accounting actually works — not just the ones that bought into the concept. 

SFC's Book & Claim and Market-Based Measures training gives practitioners that grounding: how to structure a claim that survives audit scrutiny, where the frameworks already agree and where they don't yet, and how to build the internal case across procurement, reporting, and legal. Enroll in our courses below to learn more.  

Missed part 1? Read it here. 

Enroll in our courses below to learn more.