Sustainability data specialist Thrust Carbon has partnered with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) to offer the latter’s CO2 Connect emissions calculator to clients to measure the carbon footprint of air-based business travel.
The agreement, announced at IATA’s World Sustainability Symposium in Miami this week, will commence in October and will allow corporates “unprecedented access” to IATA’S CO2 Connect methodology, as well as the propriety dataset behind it, via existing partnerships with Thrust Carbon.
IATA launched CO2 Connect in June 2022 "with the objective of using member airline data, such as fuel burn, belly cargo and load factors" to provide per-flight passenger CO2 emission calculations, according to the organisation.
More than 40 airlines currently contribute operational data to the methodology, which means that unlike popular CO2 emissions methodologies such as the DEFRA standard, CO2 Connect is based on actual fuel burn rather than modelled averages.
This includes data from 74 aircraft types representing about 98 per cent of active global passenger fleet. It also considers traffic data from 881 aircraft operators, representing about 93 per cent of global air travel, according to IATA.
The partnership with Thrust Carbon will make the methodology available for travel-related emissions reporting required to comply with the EU’s newly introduced Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Thrust said it can “activate” the CO2 Connect methodology for clients via data feeds flowing through travel management companies and expense platforms and that TMCs do not need to have a signed contract with IATA in order for Thrust to access the methodology.
“Our corporate customers can now use the CO2 Connect methodology in more places,” said Thrust Carbon co-founder Kit Aspen. “This enables more consistency for those customers, and the ability to accurately plan carrier and route changes to help meet reduction goals.”
IATA’s senior vice president, commercial products and services, Frederic Leger, added: “The corporate travel sector needs accurate and comparable CO2 emissions calculations for its ESG monitoring and reporting.”
Thrust currently offers a range of CO2 calculation methodologies to clients, but praised IATA’s CO2 Connect because “it is updated regularly based on new fuel burn data from IATA's partners, which ensures it will remain up to date and its users will benefit from advances in aircraft technology over time… IATA's methodology requires a relatively moderate amount of input data in order to produce a granular result for the user. Often, granular methodologies require very granular inputs.”
Read more about the different make-up of methodologies in BTN Europe’s recently published Navigating towards net zero report.