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 ¨C often generating significantly different figures ¨C 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 ¨C including the auditors ¨C 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 ¨C 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 ¨C we¡¯re helping them really open up their methodologies and give them the support and assurance they¡¯re looking for.¡±