TIACA launches air cargo sustainability program - Oleg Sergeev

TIACA is committed to achieving sustainable development in the air cargo industry through a centralized assessment of the performance of airlines.

The International Air Cargo Association TIACA has announced the official launch of the first program designed to assess, qualify and verify the air cargo industry. The tool, called "BlueSky", is said to be used to track the industry's progress on sustainability, benchmark against peers, and accelerate transformation.

The challenge for air cargo carriers such as ZetAvia will be to regularly collect data and facts about their activities, as well as openly report on achievements, which will be supposed to measure the level of progress made by the industry as a whole over a certain period of time.

The BlueSky program for air cargo carriers consists of three levels. The first is a self-assessment guide, the second is an online performance assessment and verification of documents provided through the dashboard. The third one includes verification and independent audit directly on the ground, after which performance will be assessed and a report will be issued through the dashboard with recommendations on how to achieve greater sustainability.

Through the new mechanism, TIACA intends to adjust the activities of individual airlines and the air cargo industry as a whole every two years in order to achieve sustainable development of the industry and improve the image as soon as possible.

The launch of the BlueSky platform was preceded by an annual survey of the sustainability of the air cargo industry, in the latest of which 55% of respondents declared the need to increase investments in sustainable development. The survey showed that only half of the companies in the state employ at least one employee responsible for this area, and only a third of the airlines have a specific budget for their implementation. Another 60% of companies that confirmed they have a dedicated sustainability budget said it had increased from the previous year, but only 50% of industry corporations share their sustainability performance with the outside world, 30% below the global trend .

In early March, the association called on air cargo carriers to set specific goals, follow them and measure progress to accelerate the transition to sustainability. At almost the same time, charter brokers advised shippers to consider a potential shortage of large aircraft amid the departure of the An-124 (AN-124), which has been widely used over the past two years to transport super-heavy and oversized cargo, and has almost no analogues. Experts note that any cargo aircraft is now worth its weight in gold and that shippers and forwarders prefer to enter into long-term charter deals with airlines to hedge against a possible shortage of capacity.