Sustainability specialist Squake is launching an initiative
to help corporates verify their business travel emissions data and, for
auditing purposes, give it “the same level of defensibility as financial data”.
The Carbon Verification Protocol, or CVP, will ensure a
company’s business travel emissions are fully traceable, immutable, and
audit-ready, says Squake. The initiative is supplier-agnostic and is designed
to deliver consistent, audit-grade emissions data.
With multiple carbon emissions methodologies in use in
business travel – often generating significantly different figures – Squake
says its Carbon Verification Protocol provides a uniform way to calculate, verify, store and retrieve
emissions values, helping “ensure every carbon figure in travel reporting can be
defended with confidence”. The company added: “It brings clarity where there was confusion and alignment
where numbers once diverged.”
CVP has been trialled by a major German company and its
auditor, and is now being offered to corporates by more than 20 of Squake’s TMC and
technology partners including BCD Travel, PredictX, Lanes & Planes, Reed
& Mackay and Atriis.
“Companies have been building their own realities with the
[emissions] standards they want to use, but now the big ones are being audited
under CSRD,” says Squake co-founder Dan Kreibich. “It leads to problems because
no one can really understand – including the auditors – how you calculated your
CO2 values.”
He continues: “The new gold standard is not picking the ‘right’
methodology but being able to prove how your CO2 was calculated – it’s about tracing
all the parameters and being able to show how you derived those CO2 values.”
Kreibich said its new protocol is likely to appeal to
companies with annual travel spend of €5 million to €10 million and above
because “these are the companies that care about CSRD and are being audited.”
He adds: “Travel managers are not typically sustainability experts,
but they are put under pressure to be 100 per cent transparent on what they do
[in terms of CO2 reporting]. At the moment, they might just say it’s the Defra standard and can’t necessarily say how it’s been applied by the company
that delivered them the data. But now they can be fully transparent – we’re
helping them really open up their methodologies and give them the support and
assurance they’re looking for.”