In June we published a piece headed “SBTi just recognised SAF Book and Claim.” The article underneath it was careful. The headline was not, and it’s the headline that travelled.
So here is the precise version, because the precise version is the one you can put in front of an auditor.
What the standard says
The Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0 runs to 105 pages. The phrase “sustainable aviation fuel” appears in none of them. Neither does “SAF”.
Aviation appears three times. Once in the glossary, defining an activity as a mode of transport. Twice more in a single row of the table that sets the emissions boundary for category 4. Jet fuel appears once, in that same row. The standard is sector-neutral, and where it mentions flying at all it’s drawing a boundary for counting emissions, not naming a way to reduce them.
What it does permit is this. Once a company has exhausted the levers inside its own operations and value chain, V2 allows actions supported by market instruments. Its words: “including energy and commodity certificates based on different chain-of-custody models (e.g., mass balance, book-and-claim), subject to the guardrails set out in the Standard.” The examples it reaches for are electricity, biomethane, steel, and cement.
Then, in the same chapter, this: “The SBTi does not seek to develop or replace certification frameworks.”
Read that twice. The standard permits the chain of custody a SAF certificate runs on, and says plainly that certifying it belongs to someone else. Anyone telling you the SBTi has approved SAF certificates is quoting a document that declines to do it.
Why the narrow version is the stronger one
In almost every first conversation, a sustainability lead asks a version of the same question. Will this spend survive an audit, and can I defend the claim?
“Permitted by a sector-neutral standard, on criteria I can point to” survives that. A claim of endorsement doesn’t, because the first person to check will find the standard never gave one. On a page where your name sits beside the number, the narrower claim is worth more.
The criteria are worth reading rather than paraphrasing. CNZS-C25 sets minimum integrity requirements for market instruments. C25.1 requires activity matching: the action must correspond to the same activity, product, material, fuel, or energy source as the one in your inventory. C25.6 requires unique attribution: outcomes clearly attributable to one company, documented where several parties reference the same action, with no over-attribution.
Read as a specification rather than a warning, that is a fair description of what a certified market is for. Activity matching is why a SAF certificate reports against your travel and nothing else. Unique attribution is one claim, one owner, counted once, which is the accounting we already run.
What we’ve delivered against it
We were among the first transactions on IATA’s CADO SAF Registry, supplying Scope 3 certificates against Microsoft’s business travel footprint. In May 2026 we delivered Scope 1 attributes to Delta Air Lines from Technical Corn Oil SAF made in Minnesota. We’re dual certified by RSB and ISCC as a Book and Claim trader, audited externally each year.
We lead with that for one reason. The integrity conditions V2 now sets out are the conditions we were already operating under.
On timing
Version 1 stays open for target setting until the end of 2027. Companies with 2030 targets are told they should start setting the next cycle under V2 from 2028, to allow lead time for implementation.
That’s a lead-time instruction, not a starting gun, and we’d rather you didn’t read it as one. The reason to act on travel emissions now is that credible supply is finite and is being claimed by other buyers while you decide. Starting small is genuinely ahead of the curve. Starting in 2028 is not.
If business travel sits in your Scope 3 and you want the exact wording to use, that’s the conversation we have most weeks. Talk to us, or start with what a SAF certificate is.
Source: SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard version 2, June 2026. Our June piece is here, headline and all.
All news and insights →