The Verdict Arrives: What SBTi's New Standard Really Means for SAF Credits

After years of waiting on the sidelines, corporate SAF buyers finally have an answer from the world's most influential target-setting body. It is a good answer. It is also more specific than most of the coverage suggests.

For the past two years, the most common question we have been asked by corporate buyers has not been about price, supply, or feedstock. It has been simpler and more fundamental: if I buy this, can I actually report it?

Writing in this space earlier in 2026, we described a market in a holding pattern. The mechanics of SAF credits worked. The registries functioned. What was missing was formal blessing from the two frameworks corporate sustainability teams actually answer to, the GHG Protocol and the Science Based Targets initiative. Without that, as we put it at the time, a SAF credit carried roughly the reporting value of an expensive carbon offset. We suggested SBTi appeared to be moving. On 11 June 2026, it moved.

Before going further, one small correction that matters more than it sounds.

A great deal has now been written about "the new SBTi aviation guidance." There isn't one. What SBTi published in June is the Corporate Net-Zero Standard Version 2.0, a general standard that applies to every company setting a science-based target, whether it makes cement or sells consultancy. The aviation sector documents, the 2021 sector guidance and the 2023 interim pathway, are still the standing aviation texts, and their revision is still ahead of us. If your internal business case cites "the aviation guidance," your assurance provider will eventually ask you to point at the paragraph, and the paragraph you want lives somewhere else entirely.

What actually landed

The short version is that SAF certificates are now legitimate.

SBTi has, for the first time, formally recognised what it calls commodity certificates as a valid way of implementing a target. SAF credits bought through book-and-claim¹ sit squarely inside that category, as do certificates for renewable gas, low-carbon hydrogen and greener steel. Both book-and-claim and mass balance² chains of custody are accommodated. For a company whose aviation footprint sits in Scope 3³, which is to say almost every company that is not an airline, the ambiguity that stalled procurement committees for four years is gone.

What replaced it is a structure, and the structure is generous in one direction and strict in another.

The generous part is a three-level hierarchy of action. SBTi wants companies to cut emissions at the source first. Where that is not possible, it accepts action taken within the same "activity pool" the emissions come from, which in aviation means the jet fuel pool your flights actually draw on. Only if you reach past that, to claim credit at a whole-sector level, do you have to formally document why you could not act closer to home. Buying SAF certificates against your own flying lands comfortably in the middle tier. No essay required. Worth noting too that the standard explicitly rules out cost and internal preference as acceptable excuses for reaching to the outer tier, so structuring the purchase correctly is not merely tidier, it is the difference between a defensible position and an indefensible one.

The strict part is everything else.

The fine print that changes how you buy

Every certificate must now clear seven integrity tests, and market instruments face five more on top. Most are what you would expect: the certificate has to represent the real attributes of the fuel conservatively rather than flatteringly, it has to be uniquely yours, it has to sit in a registry that stops anyone else claiming the same molecule.

Two of them will change procurement behaviour, and they are getting almost no attention.

The first is vintage. SBTi now requires that the action behind your certificate occurred within twelve months of your own flying, unless a longer window is justified by production cycles or established market conventions. Most registries operate a rolling twenty-four month window. SBTi has, in practice, halved it. This has a direct commercial edge, because older vintages are usually the cheaper ones. A 2024-vintage certificate offered at a discount against your 2026 travel is not a bargain. It may be a reporting problem you have paid for, and you will discover it at assurance rather than at purchase.

The second is volume matching. You cannot retire more certificates than the fuel your activity actually consumed. That sounds obvious until you see what it demands. SBTi separately requires all transport emissions to be reported well-to-wake⁴, covering the full lifecycle from feedstock through to combustion. So the test is not whether you bought a sensible amount of certificates relative to your carbon footprint. It is whether the certificate volume maps to the tonnes of jet fuel behind your flights.

The claim you can actually make with SAF credits

Here is the point we would most like buyers to take away, because it is where the current commentary is loosest.

The standard sets out three distinct kinds of claim. If your physical emissions inventory goes down, you can claim an emissions reduction. If you act directly on your own activities, you can claim alignment. And if you act at the activity pool or sector level, through instruments reported alongside your inventory rather than inside it, you may claim that you are contributing to the decarbonisation of the system your business depends on.

Unbundled SAF certificates fall into that third bucket. In practice that is the difference between two sentences in your annual report.

Not this: "SAF certificates reduced our business travel emissions by 12 percent."

But this: "We retired SAF certificates covering 12 percent of our business travel fuel, reported separately from our inventory, in support of our target to increase the share of lower-carbon fuel behind our flying."

The second sentence is longer and less satisfying. It is also the one that survives contact with an auditor.

This is not a demotion, and it is certainly not a reason to hesitate. It is a drafting instruction. V2.0 explicitly allows what it calls volume alignment targets for business travel and for upstream transport, meaning targets to raise the share of your flying and freight that is lower-carbon. Set your target in that shape, retire certificates against it, describe it in the language the standard authorises, and the programme holds. Set a blunt absolute-reduction target and then ask certificates to carry it, and you will have an awkward conversation in 2029.

Getting this right when you set the target costs nothing. Getting it wrong is expensive to unwind.

What this means if you are buying SAF credits

Three practical consequences follow, and they are more concrete than the framework language suggests.

First, check whether this applies to you at all. SBTi's stricter tier catches companies above €450 million turnover or 1,000 employees, and considerably smaller thresholds in high-income countries. Those companies must set Scope 3 targets covering every category worth 5 percent or more of their Scope 3 footprint. For professional services, pharmaceuticals, technology and consumer goods firms, business travel and air freight routinely clear that bar. If you are in that group, this is not optional reading.

Second, stop buying in December. SBTi now recommends acquiring market instruments progressively across the target period rather than deferring to the end. Our own registry tracking shows the opposite habit is deeply entrenched, with retirements clustering heavily around corporate reporting deadlines. That habit is about to get expensive: a tightening vintage window plus a thin market means the year-end scramble competes for exactly the certificates that still qualify.

Third, interrogate the programme, not just the certificate. One of the new tests puts the burden on the issuing framework itself to demonstrate that demand for its certificates actually increases the supply of low-carbon fuel. Registries answer that question differently, and some barely answer it at all. It is a question worth asking before you transact, not after.

Which brings us back to trust

We wrote earlier this year that a SAF credit is not a bucket of fuel delivered with your business trip. It is a promise: that a specific volume of lower-carbon fuel was made and used, that the savings are real and verified, and that nobody else has claimed them. What SBTi has done is set out, in unusual detail, what that promise now has to look like to count.

The market has not been waiting patiently for this. Corporate retirements in the first half of 2026 ran some 85 percent ahead of the same period a year earlier, and the share of buyers willing to put their name to a purchase rather than transact anonymously grew faster still. Companies were already moving. What they lacked was a rulebook beyond the SAF registry guidances, and now they have one.

The difficulty is that the promise still comes in a dozen dialects. Attributes are issued through RSB's book-and-claim registry, RMI's SAFc framework, ISCC's credit transfer system, and a set of airline and industry registries built around their own primary users. Retirement disclosure varies. Emission factors vary. Feedstock and vintage disclosure vary considerably. Two certificates described identically in a sales deck can carry different reduction values, different vintage exposure, and very different audit risk.

That is the market SAF Planet works in. We aggregate and reconcile what the public registries actually publish, retirement by retirement. We know what has been retired, by whom, under which framework, at what claimed intensity and from what vintage, because we count it. When a counterparty tells you a certificate is SBTi-ready, that is a claim you can check against the record rather than accept on faith.

We are also not a fuel producer, not an airline, and not carrying inventory we need to move. Most of the well-funded voices in this debate speak from the supply side. We work for the buyer, which sometimes means saying that a certificate being pushed hard at you is not worth the asking price, or that the cheapest option on the table is the one most likely to be questioned later.

We would not pretend to have the last word. The standard runs to several hundred pages, the sector guidance has not landed, and anyone who claims to know where the GHG Protocol ends up is guessing. What we can do is read the text closely, count what is verifiable, and be plain about where the uncertainty sits so you can price it.

Start with what you already hold

Before you buy anything, get clear on three things: your real air travel and freight exposure in tonnes of fuel rather than euros of spend, whether the certificates on offer survive the new integrity and vintage tests, and whether your target is even drafted in a form that lets certificates count.

Ready to make the next move? Get in touch with us at info@safplanet.earth or fill out the contact form on www.safplanet.earth

Footnotes

1. Book-and-claim is a chain of custody model in which the environmental attributes of SAF are separated from the physical fuel and traded independently as certificates. It exists because physically delivering SAF to the specific aircraft a given employee flies on is impractical at scale. 

2. Mass balance allows sustainable and conventional fuel to be physically mixed while the environmental attributes travel through the existing supply chain, avoiding fully segregated transport. Unlike book-and-claim, it does not fully separate the attribute from the fuel on paper.

3. Scope 3 covers all indirect emissions across a company's value chain that are not direct operational emissions (Scope 1) or purchased energy (Scope 2). For most corporates, employee flights and air freight sit here.

4. Well-to-wake accounting captures emissions across the entire lifecycle of the fuel, from feedstock production through to combustion in the engine, rather than combustion alone.