Carbon offsetting platform helps BIFA guide on green issues
25 / 01 / 2023
Stephen Parker. Source: BIFA
The British International Freight Association (BIFA) is cooperating with integrated carbon measurement and offsetting platform Pledge to help its members better understand and address the environmental issues that affect how they manage international supply chains.
Pledge will provide BIFA with resources that will help support members carry out operations that are more environmentally sustainable.
Those resources will be designed to guide members on what to do to address the tasks at hand, rather than how to do it, said BIFA.
They will address what needs to be considered as the main environmental issues, and the challenges they pose; whilst providing guidance on the steps that they should take to launch an environmental policy, or enhance an existing one.
Newly appointed BIFA director general Steve Parker said: “The need to understand and address the environmental impact of freight forwarders’ activities within global supply chains grows by the day.
“Our members are facing increasing pressure from regulators, business partners, and consumers amongst others, in favour of business initiatives and good practice that are considered to be environmentally friendly.
“At a business level, our members are increasingly seeing tenders that demand actual evidence of what they are doing to reduce harmful emissions and undertake their operations in a more environmentally friendly and sustainable manner.
“There is a clear direction of travel on this subject and we want to help BIFA members, small and large, who may need some support on where to start when it comes to taking effective action to understand and reduce their carbon footprint. They are already seeking guidance from their trade association and this is where our partnership with Pledge will help.”
David de Picciotto, Pledge co-founder and chief executive, said: “The pressure on logistics service providers is not going away, but will only continue to grow. They need to take action now, and it all starts with getting thorough visibility of their carbon footprint. We’re excited to be able to support BIFA members to accelerate the decarbonisation of their customers’ supply chains.”
Parker added: “We have seen a gradual shift over several years and the reality is that carbon reduction and the more widely related environmental sustainability agenda are now no longer seen as a ‘nice to have’ or ‘tree hugging’ initiatives, but increasingly mainstream business activities, taking centre stage on the business agenda.
“While some members are already deploying sustainability technologies and strategies to reduce freight emissions, these practices are not yet widely adopted. For the most part this has been seen in larger organisations as part of most tenders and business activities, but the process is filtering down into smaller businesses and it is BIFA’s responsibility to be able to assist all our members, whatever their size, to meet this challenge to their long term viability.
“Our cooperation with Pledge presents a huge opportunity for the trade association to deliver advice and help empower our members on how they can better understand and calculate their carbon footprint and the actions that they need to take in order to reduce it.
“It’s more important than ever for companies to make climate-conscious supply chain decisions that will enable them to grow sustainability and satisfy stakeholder demands around emissions.
“Cooperating with Pledge means we can support our members as they seek to achieve more and more ambitious climate action goals.”
