Air France-KLM, Delta Air Lines and Virgin Atlantic today announced the launch of the Sustainable Aviation Initiative (SAI) in partnership with EcoVadis. Driven by members' commitment to improving sustainability performance, SAI will work to accelerate sustainable practices, build transparency and amplify positive impact across its value chain through close collaboration with its partners.
Commercial aviation is vital to our economy and a conduit that connects billions of people. The environmental and social crisis facing the planet has increased the need for innovation not only for more sustainable fuels, but also for more sustainable and ethical business practices across the industry's value chain. Annette Quincy, Director of Sector Programs at EcoVadis. "Through the SAI, members entrust EcoVadis with coordinating their collective efforts so that they can increase the visibility of the **chain and drive improvements to create a more sustainable future for all. ”
SAI seeks to address the core sustainability challenges facing its value chain, including increasing merchant engagement rates, accelerating merchant performance improvement curves, and increasing merchant engagement by focusing on key industry categories.
To achieve these goals, SAI has chosen EcoVadis to provide a common voice, standards and platform to improve sustainability performance across the industry's value chain. EcoVadis will provide SAI with a proven sustainability rating methodology, tailored benchmarking assessments, scorecards and data mining solutions to track and improve the sustainability performance of industry vendors.
The functionality of the EcoVadis Industry Program is built as an antitrust-compliant network that enables more efficient business onboarding, transparency, collaboration and analytics. These capabilities enable SAI to gain visibility into sustainability performance across the entire aviation chain. SAI members will meet quarterly to exchange best practices for sustainable procurement and identify business-oriented improvement action plans. This provides a unified path for SAI members to make a positive impact within the community and in the environment and society.
Achieving net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050 is essential for our future, and for this the full participation of the entire ** chain is necessary. In addition to fleet renewal, the inclusion of sustainable aviation fuel, and operational measures, SAI is one of our specific sustainability initiatives. It sends a strong and unified call to action to our partners, while also making things easier: the evaluation of one airline is the evaluation of all the airlines in the SAI. We encourage other airlines to join us in accelerating our journey towards a more transparent **chain. Jurriaan Lombaers, Senior Vice President Procurement at Air France-KLM.
At Virgin Atlantic, our mission is to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, recognising the critical role we must play in reducing our direct impact. Similarly, it's critical to understand how our **chain contributes and find opportunities to work towards future improvements. We are proud to build on our Sustainable Aviation program and work with our joint venture partners to accelerate this process," said Caz Johnson, Director of Procurement and Working Capital at Virgin Atlantic.
To be an industry leader in creating a more sustainable future of travel, we know we must also work with our business partners to develop standards for transparency and accountability. The Sustainable Aviation Program enables Delta to send a strong signal to businesses about the importance of working with partners who share our values and will help increase transparency across the chain. We are delighted to be a founding member of SAI together with our partners from Air France-KLM and Virgin Atlantic, as we believe this is an important step in creating an industry-wide positive impact through value chain engagement. Delta Air Lines' ** chain management.
Since the program's inception in March 2023, SAI's three founding members have collectively rated more than 700 merchants. SAI plans to expand this number to gain a deeper understanding of the sustainability performance of its **chain and drive maximum improvements.