Three scopes, in plain terms
The GHG Protocol sorts a company’s emissions into three scopes, and the whole market for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) runs on the distinction.
Scope 1 is direct: emissions from assets you own or control, which for an airline means the fuel its aircraft burn. Scope 2 covers purchased electricity, heat, and steam. Scope 3 is everything indirect across your value chain, upstream and downstream. Business travel is Scope 3, Category 6; freight you pay others to move sits in Categories 4 and 9.
Scope 2 rarely features in aviation stories, but the frame is incomplete without it.
The same flight, two ledgers
When your team flies, the airline records the flight’s emissions in its Scope 1. Your company records its share of the same flight in its Scope 3. Both entries are real, both are required, and neither cancels the other. One company’s Scope 1 is routinely another company’s Scope 3. That is how the accounting system is built.
Whose reduction is it, then?
When SAF replaces fossil fuel, the reduction lands in both ledgers, so the registry splits the ownership formally. Under the RSB’s rulebook, the airline named on the retirement statement is the exclusive owner of the Scope 1 claim. The corporate end-user named on the statement owns the Scope 3 claim, assigned at retirement, and can use it to compensate for its business travel emissions, capped at its actual footprint in the sector for that year.
IATA’s accounting methodology says the same thing from the other direction: producer, airline, and customer can each make claims against one batch without double claiming, but only one airline can ever make the Scope 1 claim.
Why this is not double counting
Double counting is the same reduction claimed twice in the same scope. The airline’s Scope 1 entry and the corporate’s Scope 3 entry are different accounting entries for different entities, and the registry retires the Scope 1 claim before any Scope 3 claim, proving the fuel was used. One physical intervention, two legitimate claims, each owned once. The registry lesson shows the machinery in detail.
For target setters, the SBTi’s Corporate Net-Zero Standard version 2 states that targets “may be supported by market instruments, including energy attributes and commodity certificates based on different chain-of-custody models (e.g., mass balance, book-and-claim), subject to guardrails”. The standard permits this route, with integrity criteria attached, and it is worth reading those criteria in full. We set out what the SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard v2 actually says about Book and Claim in its own piece.
Why this is the commercial engine
The split is what funds the scale-up. Corporate demand for the Scope 3 attribute shares the SAF premium, which is what makes uplift viable for the airline in the first place. Two buyers, one tonne, both reporting genuine progress.
You can see the split in black and white on our own retirement statement from May 2026: Scope 1, Delta Air Lines Inc.; Scope 3, Future Energy Capital Limited. Two names, two scopes, one batch of fuel, counted once each.
If you are the corporate in that sentence, the corporates page is your next step. If you are the airline, yours is here.