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Most climate budgets eventually face the same question. The company has reduced what it can for now, and there is still a gap. So what do you buy, and why?
The market offers several answers. Sustainable Aviation Fuel certificates. Carbon removals. Avoidance-based offsets. They are often discussed as if they compete for the same slot in the budget. They do not. They do different jobs.
For an ESG lead or CFO, the mistake is not choosing one over another. The mistake is using the wrong instrument for the wrong emissions.
They are not interchangeable
It is tempting to treat every climate instrument as a unit of CO2 with a price. Buy the cheapest tonne and move on.
But a tonne is not just a tonne. The instruments differ in what they actually do, how closely they connect to your own emissions, and how well they hold up under scrutiny.
SAFc support lower-carbon fuel inside the aviation system. Carbon removals take carbon out of the atmosphere and, ideally, store it durably. Avoidance offsets pay for emissions to not happen somewhere else. Same currency on the surface, very different substance underneath.
Reduce first, then choose your instrument
None of these tools replaces reduction. Every credible framework, including SBTi, puts cutting emissions inside your own value chain first. Instruments come after, for what you cannot yet reduce.
That ordering matters for how you talk about any purchase. A SAF certificate, a removal or an offset is part of a strategy that also includes flying less, choosing better freight, and engaging suppliers. It is not a substitute for that work.
Once that is clear, the choice between instruments becomes a question of fit.
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Where SAFc fit
SAFc are sector-specific. Their natural home is aviation, which for most companies means Scope 3 emissions from business travel and air freight.
Their strength is connection. They act on the same activity that creates the emissions, inside the same system, rather than paying for an unrelated reduction elsewhere. For a company with material aviation emissions, that alignment is increasingly what stakeholders and frameworks expect.
They are best understood as a transition lever for hard-to-reduce flying, not as a way to zero out a travel footprint on paper.
Where carbon removals fit
Carbon removals address a different need: the residual emissions that remain after reduction, and the longer-term logic of net zero.
Net zero, by definition, assumes that whatever a company cannot eliminate is balanced by durable removal of carbon from the atmosphere. Removals are therefore the end-state instrument, the thing that neutralises the last, stubborn fraction.
They vary widely in durability and quality, from nature-based approaches to engineered storage, and they deserve the same due diligence as any other purchase. But their role in the strategy is distinct from SAFc. One supports decarbonising a sector now. The other compensates for what is left.
Where offsets still fit, and where they do not
Traditional avoidance offsets, paying for emissions to not occur elsewhere, have come under the most pressure.
They can still play a role as a contribution to climate action beyond your value chain, sometimes described as beyond value chain mitigation. What they are increasingly not is a credible way to claim that your own emissions have been cancelled out.
The distinction is between a contribution claim and a reduction claim. Offsets are better suited to the former. SAFc and removals, used correctly and connected to the right emissions, are better suited to the latter.
The question is not which instrument is cheapest. It is which one honestly matches the emissions you are trying to address.
A simple way to decide
For most companies, a workable order of thinking looks like this:
- Reduce what you can inside your own operations and value chain first
- For aviation emissions you cannot yet cut, consider SAFc as a sector-aligned lever
- For residual emissions on the path to net zero, consider durable carbon removals
- For action beyond your value chain, consider offsets as a contribution, not a reduction
- Match the claim to the instrument, and never the other way around
- Document the logic, so the strategy holds up under audit and scrutiny
This is less about picking a winner and more about building a portfolio where each instrument does the job it is actually good at.
The strongest strategies use the right tool for each emission
SAFc, removals and offsets are not rivals. They are different instruments for different parts of the problem, and a mature climate strategy usually uses more than one.
For ESG and finance teams, clarity about which lever does what is what keeps a net zero or SBTi-aligned strategy defensible. The companies that get this wrong tend to over-rely on a single instrument, or stretch a claim past what the tool can support.
Refine helps companies place SAFc correctly within that wider picture, so aviation emissions are addressed with the right instrument, at the right time, for the right claim.
