IATA and ICAO have signed a cooperation agreement at Aviation Climate Week in Montreal under which both organizations have agreed to explore how SAF registries and the data they collect can support the implementation of ICAO’s Long-Term Aspirational Goal (LTAG) Monitoring and Reporting (LMR) methodology, as well as the consideration of fuel-accounting systems for international aviation. The IATA press release identifies the CADO SAF Registry ‘among others’ as relevant infrastructure.
The structural significance sits at the registry layer rather than the production layer. SAF environmental attributes are increasingly tracked separately from the physical fuel via book-and-claim arrangements, with corporate buyers able to retire attribute certificates against their voluntary emissions claims even when the physical fuel is delivered into a different airport. The integrity of that system depends on the registry layer not double-counting and not drifting from the methodology used by ICAO and member states to measure progress against the long-term goal. The Montreal cooperation agreement is the first formal step toward aligning the registry-data layer with the LMR side.
Credible tracking is necessary to know the emissions reductions delivered by SAF. The data collected by the CADO SAF Registry, among others, has the potential to meet this need.
That line, from Willie Walsh, IATA Director General, identifies the lever the cooperation is pulling and is careful to qualify CADO as one of several relevant registries. ICAO’s LTAG, adopted at the 41st Assembly in 2022, sets the trajectory the LMR methodology is meant to measure, and ICAO’s state-reporting framework has to date primarily aggregated national fuel volumes and intensity inputs rather than drawing on registry-level transaction data. Walsh framed the next stage as one of accelerating deployment and building trust across stakeholders, and Juan Carlos Salazar, ICAO Secretary General, framed the cooperation as supporting the integrity of global fuel-accounting systems through improved monitoring of SAF production, distribution and use. Both organizations reiterated the shared net-zero by 2050 commitment for international aviation.
The May 2026 interoperability pilot between CADO, 123Carbon and 4AIR’s Assure SAF Registry sits beside this announcement and is its registry-operator-side complement: three peer registries running an industry-side pilot to align attribute integrity across sectors, while ICAO and IATA explore the regulator-monitoring side. The Montreal agreement does not bind ICAO to integrate any specific registry’s data into LMR; it is an exploratory cooperation arrangement. The methodology itself would need a separate decision.
The forward read is that the 2026 to 2027 window is when the global SAF registry infrastructure is being built out, and the early methodology signals will influence which data sources the next generation of corporate SAF disclosures and regulator filings rely on. CORSIA’s own market-based-measure rules sit under a separate ICAO workstream and are not directly addressed by this LMR-side cooperation. Registries that integrate cleanly with whatever LMR methodology ICAO adopts will be the ones positioned to scale into the regulator-recognized lane.
Source: IATA press release
