CORSIA comes up early in any serious conversation about aviation emissions, usually as an acronym nobody stops to explain. It is worth explaining, because it is the reason certification for sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, is structured the way it is.
What does CORSIA stand for?
The Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation. It was developed by ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization, and approved by the ICAO Council.
The name is a fair description of its origins and a poor description of what most people encounter it for. For anyone buying sustainable fuel voluntarily, the part you meet in practice is the sustainability framework, because it sets the standard certification is audited against.
What does CORSIA actually do for SAF?
Two things, and the second is the one you meet in practice.
It defines the sustainability criteria a fuel has to meet before it counts. And it recognises the independent certification schemes that audit fuel against those criteria, rather than auditing anything itself. ICAO sets the bar; recognised schemes do the checking.
RSB and ISCC are both recognised under CORSIA, which is why their names appear on certificates and registry entries throughout this market. Future Energy Global is certified under ISCC CORSIA and under RSB’s ICAO CORSIA standard, and audited externally by SCS Global Services.
Does a fuel have to be CORSIA certified?
It depends what the fuel is for, and this is where the acronym causes confusion.
CORSIA is a compliance instrument, built for airlines with obligations under it. A voluntary buyer funding sustainable fuel to address their own travel emissions is doing something different, and the certification they need follows the claim they intend to make rather than the scheme’s name.
In practice the frameworks overlap heavily, because the underlying question is the same: can this batch be traced, was it audited, and has anyone else already claimed it. A fuel certified under a CORSIA-recognised scheme has answered those questions, which is why the certification is useful evidence in a voluntary claim. Using that fuel against a CORSIA requirement is a separate step, taken by the airline under ICAO’s rules.
Is CORSIA the same as offsetting?
No, and the distinction is the one most worth remembering.
An offset pays for a reduction somewhere else, in an unrelated sector, and counts it against your own emissions. Insetting funds a reduction inside your own value chain: for aviation, that means real sustainable fuel entering the aviation fuel supply, reducing the emissions of the sector that is actually causing them.
What we do is insetting. The environmental attributes we trade come from certified fuel that goes into aircraft, and they are retired once to the party that funded them. CORSIA’s name includes the word offsetting because offsetting is still its main mechanism. Eligible fuel is how an airline reduces the amount it has to offset. Neither is insetting, and neither is what we sell.
What should a buyer take from this?
That the acronym on a certificate tells you which rulebook was applied, not how good the fuel is.
CORSIA recognition means a scheme has been assessed as competent to audit against ICAO’s criteria. It is a floor and a common language, which is exactly what a market this young needs. When you are handed a certificate, the useful questions are which scheme issued it, what it covers, and whether the reduction it records has been retired to you alone.