Book and claim has barely started in shipping

Book and claim lets cargo owners pay for zero-emission fuel they never physically receive, yet most of the shipping industry has not started using it.

What the Action Framework found

The Getting to Zero Coalition's 2026 Action Framework, published by the Global Maritime Forum, assessed 44 shipowners, operators and charterers on book and claim. Of those, 33 showed insufficient action. Four take part in working groups on the topic, five offer verified insets, and two add additionality assurance to the insets they offer.

The report itself describes book and claim as a form of insetting. That framing matters, because it places these instruments inside the value chain of the companies that use them rather than outside it.

How book and claim works

Zero-emission fuel is scarce and not available on every route. Book and claim separates the environmental attribute of a cleaner voyage from the physical cargo. A cargo owner pays for zero-emission fuel to be used on a voyage within the fleet that serves it, even if its own containers travel on a different ship, and in return it receives a record of the emissions reductions that the fuel delivered.

For carriers, that model creates a buyer for fuel that would otherwise be hard to justify at its current premium. For cargo owners, it offers a way to act on shipping emissions now instead of waiting until cleaner fuel reaches every lane they use.

Why the record is the product

For cargo owners, the value of book and claim depends entirely on the quality of the record. A verified record of a zero-emission fuel voyage is what turns a freight contract into a Scope 3 reduction. Without it, the payment is a cost with no defensible claim attached.

Inset credits record that reduction once, with no double counting. Credits are issued to the project developer after independent verification, and Carbon3 records them in its registry, so the carrier, the cargo owner and any auditor can see who holds each claim.

The Action Framework results suggest the gap is less about the concept and more about adoption. A small group of companies already offers verified insets, while most of those assessed have not moved beyond the starting line.

Claim treatment depends on the applicable reporting framework.

Source: Global Maritime Forum, Getting to Zero Coalition Action Framework 2026.