Verifavia, the independent transport emissions verifier and part of Normec Group, has become the first validation and verification body to obtain approval from global freight transportation decarbonisation body, Smart Freight Centre under its Conformity Assessment Scheme.
Smart Freight Centre’s Conformity Assessment Scheme is the next step in its work to identify and encourage logistics decarbonisation strategies. Smart Freight Centre developed the Global Logistics Emissions Council (GLEC) Framework – designed to inform business decisions that reduce emissions and track progress towards climate goals. This provided the foundation for ISO 14083, a common methodology established in early 2023 for the quantification and reporting of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from passenger and freight transportation, now the definitive standard for transport carbon accounting.
Third party verification is essential to ensure the credibility of sustainability reporting. Now that ISO 14083 is in place, Smart Freight Centre is focused on ensuring competent assurance of the reported information by providing the Conformity Assessment Scheme which enables a consistent evaluation, specifically designed for assessing logistics GHG emission calculations. The scheme promotes a shortlist of Smart Freight Centre’s approved Verification and Validation Bodies (VVB’s). Verifavia received the first formal approval as a VVB following the first ever Smart Freight Centre VVB mandatory training and exam.
From left to right (part of the Verifavia team):
Nilay Warkhedkar, Environmental Emission Analyst
Himanshu Rai Sharma, Business Developper
Nicolas Duchêne, President
Yuvraj Thakur, VP Commercial Shipping
Rajat Bishnoi, Director of Shipping Emissions & Performance BU
Shubham Jain, Business Development Manager
Christoph Wolff, CEO of Smart Freight Centre, commented: “Comparing GHG emissions across different modes of transport or suppliers can be like comparing apples with oranges. That’s why the GLEC Framework was developed, to harmonise the calculation and reporting of logistics GHG emissions across multi-modal supply chains. It is the primary industry guideline to support implementation of ISO 14083, and can be implemented by shippers, carriers and logistics service providers.”
Christoph Wolff continued: “Third party assurance of GHG reporting enhances its credibility. It provides trust that the information is accurate, relevant, reliable and complete. Verifavia is the first VVB to receive Smart Freight Centre’s approval. This underlines the team’s in-depth knowledge of GHG accounting in line with ISO 14083. We are confident that they will set the benchmark for competent and impartial assurance of GHG emissions statements.”
Nicolas Duchene, president of Verifavia
Compliance with ISO 14083 is a crucial and fundamental step to ensure accuracy of emissions inventories, from which all other emissions-related efforts can be derived. These efforts include commercial activity such as pooling across ownership groups, insurance, primary (sometimes instantaneous) emissions data sharing among suppliers, and emerging topics such as market based measures and insetting. There is demand for assurance services for several of these activities, and Verifavia is focused on meeting this demand.
Nicolas Duchene, president of Verifavia, said: “Calculating emissions is now mandatory across the logistics supply chain. ISO 14083 provides a new tool for the transport sector to drive climate action, create policies and roadmaps to reduce emissions, and track progress. Recognition from the Smart Freight Centre is a testament to Verifavia’s unwavering commitment to providing transparent, independent, and robust verification services. Today, carbon has a value, and Verifavia is supporting companies across the shipping, road and rail sectors to realise the commercial opportunity that emissions reduction represents.”
Verifavia has been working with carbon insetting platform, 123Carbon and its partner AllChiefs to support companies including Danish shipping company, Norden and fuel supplier, Titan in issuing carbon inset tokens that enable the decarbonisation of customer supply chains.
Source: Verifavia