By Vincent Santamaria
Corporate appetite to fund aviation decarbonisation is growing, but clearer climate accounting could turn that appetite into investment at the scale SAF requires.
Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) does not have a demand problem so much as a recognition problem. Companies are increasingly willing to invest in aviation’s transition, but current corporate emissions accounting gives them limited ability to reflect that investment in climate reporting.
Accounting rules influence where companies direct capital. Proposed changes to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol could give SAF certificates a recognised place in corporate reporting, helping businesses beyond aviation share the cost of decarbonising a sector on which global commerce depends.
Is corporate demand for SAF really the problem?
The evidence suggests there is already significant corporate appetite to invest.
The Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance (SABA), which brings together companies seeking to accelerate aviation decarbonisation, says its members have aggregated demand for more than $400 million of SAF certificates since 2021. Its SAFc Connect platform also reported immediate demand of around $30 million among participating members.
The significance is not simply the money committed. It is the signal that businesses outside aviation are prepared to fund SAF when they can see a credible mechanism for doing so.
The difficulty is that a company can pay for SAF to be produced and used in aviation, yet its Scope 3 inventory may still show emissions from business travel or air freight essentially unchanged. The company has acted, but the conventional inventory has nowhere appropriate to record that action.
That weakens the incentive for a finance, technology, consultancy or manufacturing company to spend more on lower-carbon aviation if its climate reporting cannot distinguish that investment from doing nothing.
Aviation is particularly difficult to decarbonise through conventional efficiency measures alone. IATA estimates airlines will need around 500 million tonnes of SAF a year by 2050 to achieve net zero COâ‚‚ emissions. In 2025, global SAF production was only around 1.9 million tonnes, equivalent to 0.6% of jet fuel consumption.
The gap will not be closed by airlines alone.
How could better accounting unlock more private investment?
This is where the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s work on Actions and Market Instruments becomes important.
The Protocol is developing a framework for reporting climate actions and market instruments that sit outside a company’s conventional physical emissions inventory. Its Phase 1 white paper proposes a multi-statement approach that would keep the physical GHG inventory intact while allowing companies to report separately on qualifying actions and market instruments. SAF certificates are among the transport instruments being considered.
The proposal is not to let companies subtract purchased SAF certificates from their actual Scope 3 emissions. A company should not be able to make its physical emissions disappear because it has bought an environmental attribute.
Instead, the logic is to create a transparent second layer of reporting: the emissions inventory records what happened physically, while a separate statement shows what the company did to support measurable decarbonisation elsewhere.
There is an important precedent. In 2015, the GHG Protocol’s Scope 2 Guidance introduced rules for contractual instruments such as renewable energy certificates in accounting for purchased electricity. It also established quality criteria covering uniqueness, tracking and retirement.
The lesson is broader than electricity. Accounting is not merely a record of what businesses have done; it can influence what they are prepared to do next.
Why does this matter beyond the aviation industry?
Aviation generates value far beyond airlines. Businesses depend on air travel to move people, goods, ideas and investment around the world, so the cost of aviation’s transition should not sit exclusively on airline balance sheets.
That cost is already substantial. IATA says airlines paid a $2.9 billion premium for the limited 1.9 million tonnes of SAF available in 2025, while the industry’s net profit margin is now expected to be 2.0% in 2026.
Corporate SAF certificates offer a different model. They allow businesses that benefit from aviation to contribute directly to the transition, while the physical fuel can be delivered wherever it is operationally most useful.
This matters because jet fuel is fungible. Once SAF is blended into a common fuel system, it is not realistically possible to identify which molecules powered a particular passenger or cargo journey.
A robust book-and-claim system therefore separates the physical fuel from its verified environmental attributes. The fuel goes where it can be used most effectively; the attributes are recorded, transferred and ultimately retired on behalf of the buyer.
SABA already uses this model in corporate SAF procurement, allowing companies to invest even when the fuel does not physically flow into the aircraft they use.
What safeguards are needed to make SAF certificates credible?
Recognition alone is not enough. The market also needs clear rules that give companies confidence that the certificates they buy represent genuine emissions reductions.
The experience of renewable electricity shows why this matters. A credible system needs to ensure that each environmental benefit is counted only once, that certificates can be properly tracked and retired, and that the underlying emissions reductions are transparent and verifiable.
For SAF, that means having robust systems in place to prevent double counting, provide clear lifecycle emissions data and distinguish between a company’s physical emissions and the actions it is taking to support wider decarbonisation.
These safeguards are essential to building trust in the market and ensuring corporate investment delivers genuine climate impact.
The GHG Protocol stresses that its proposed Actions and Market Instruments framework is still under development and that the current white paper is not a standard. A formal public consultation on a draft standard is planned for the third quarter of 2027.
That makes the period ahead important. The rules are still being shaped, and industry has an opportunity to ensure they are rigorous enough to command confidence while practical enough to encourage investment.
What should companies do now?
Businesses should not wait for final accounting rules before considering how aviation fits into their transition strategies.
Three steps are particularly useful:
- Understand the aviation footprint. Identify how much of Scope 3 emissions comes from business travel and air freight, and where SAF procurement could have the greatest impact.
- Assess high-integrity SAF opportunities. Examine book-and-claim mechanisms, certificate quality, lifecycle emissions data and registry arrangements.
- Engage in the standards process. Companies, airlines, fuel producers and buyers should help shape the criteria while the GHG Protocol framework is still being developed.
The distinction between accounting and target-setting also matters. The GHG Protocol determines how emissions and relevant actions can be accounted for and reported; other initiatives and policymakers determine how those figures may subsequently be used in targets or regulatory frameworks.
Recognition in corporate reporting would not, by itself, solve aviation’s decarbonisation challenge. But it could remove an important barrier to private investment.
Aviation has spent years developing the physical infrastructure, regulatory frameworks and market mechanisms needed to introduce SAF. The next challenge is connecting those efforts to the balance sheets of the businesses that depend on aviation.
The central question is no longer whether companies are willing to help fund the transition. It is whether the accounting system gives them a credible way to show what they have done.
If the answer becomes yes, corporate capital can become a much larger part of the solution. What gets counted gets funded.
