Inset Insight – contributing to a more sustainable aviation future

April 25, 2025

As part of our Insights series, PACE is sharing commercial examples from our customers and partners of solutions for more sustainable aviation. Last month SBTi published a first draft of its new Corporate Net-Zero Standard in which it recognised the benefits of “indirect mitigation”, and so in this article we asked Natasha Mann, CEO of Future Energy Global, to explain the business of “insetting” and how it can support corporate decarbonisation.

Sustainability reporting has historically been the preserve of large companies such as oil, mining and aviation, whose activities had significant direct environmental impact. Today sustainability concerns a far wider group of businesses, where for many, Scope 3 emissions represent by far the biggest slice of their total emissions pie. The key consideration for any corporate is to understand this data, and which elements can be influenced or controlled by them. One example is employee business travel contained within their Scope 3 number.

One strategy in reducing this component of Scope 3 has been to cut non-essential business travel, while another has seen some early adopters mitigate emissions by investing in nature-based offset schemes that were protecting ecosystems. Today there is more choice, such as compensating within the company’s own value chain. This newest generation of compensation solution for corporate emissions is called “insetting”.

The term insetting is used to describe any solution whereby companies reduce net emissions by taking mitigation actions directly within their own business activity, whether with suppliers upstream, customers downstream, or both. Aviation is a good example. The airline flying the aircraft is generating Scope 1 emissions from its direct flight activity, while in parallel Scope 3 emissions are attributable to the bank or lessor that has been financing the aircraft, and to every corporate that has business travellers on board. The Scope 1 and Scope 3 figures are directly aligned, so if the airline uses SAF to reduce its Scope 1, there is a corresponding reduction opportunity for those on the Scope 3 side.

At Future Energy Global we have developed a solution whereby companies can mitigate their Scope 3 emissions directly within these value chains, by acquiring Scope 3 credits derived from the airlines’ use of SAF. This is an example of insetting, and it’s very tangible – the carbon reduction is immediate and exactly quantifiable. SBTi in its latest draft guidance has recognised the benefits of this kind of “indirect mitigation”, citing SAF Book and Claim systems as its example. Book and Claim refers to the process of treating the environmental attributes of SAF (i.e. Scope 1 and Scope 3) separately from the fuel molecules themselves. This relies on a robust tracking and accounting register to ensure that the attributes are not double-counted, so an important step for companies like Future Energy Global is to be certified by the operators SAF registries, in our case RSB and ISCC. This combination of Book and Claim and SAF registries is key to assuring clients such as Microsoft that the emissions savings are real and quantifiable. In the insetting model, the corresponding Scope 3 attributes are supplied by the partner airlines and the attributes are transferred directly to us “on-register”, preserving a traceability chain stretching back to the feedstocks used to make the SAF and guaranteeing the robustness of the carbon reductions. The Scope 3 benefits are then “retired” on behalf of the client, with the transaction publicly recorded on the register and a certificate of the detailed emissions reduction figures provided to the client for their sustainability audits.

We are all aware that the clock is ticking quickly towards the committed decarbonisation milestones of 2050. In addition to the direct benefits of insetting, companies that choose this model are also contributing to the inflow of capital into the SAF industry, thereby acting as an accelerant towards the vast capital investment required to scale-up production to the hard to imagine 400-fold factor required if aviation is to meet its 2050 net-zero CO₂ commitments.

Insetting is a concrete way for responsible companies that rely on aviation to contribute to securing its sustainable future.