Maritime book and claim has earned trust. It has not yet earned fit.

Book and claim has become one of the main ways cargo owners can support lower-emission shipping before clean fuels are available on every route. A new survey suggests the model has won the trust of buyers. What it has not yet done is fit the way those buyers work.

What the survey found

In August 2026, the Getting to Zero Coalition published research on accelerating market participation in maritime book and claim. It surveyed demand-side participants, the companies that buy or might buy lower-emission shipping.

Confidence in the rules was high. 92% of respondents said voluntary book-and-claim markets uphold strict criteria that assure credibility.

Confidence in how the market works day to day was much lower. Only 25% saw standardized accounting guidelines. 17% found the market easy to navigate, and 8% saw standardized procedures. Not a single respondent said the current market meets their organization's needs.

The barrier is not the rules

Those results point to a clear conclusion. For cargo owners, the integrity of the framework is not what is holding them back. The barriers are practical ones: procurement, data and claims.

Buying lower-emission voyages has to fit into existing purchasing processes. The data behind each claim has to be clear enough for sustainability and finance teams to rely on. And companies need confidence in how a purchase can be reported against their Scope 3 targets.

Turning trust into a usable lever

Co-funding lower-emission voyages in a company's own value chain is one way to close that gap. The support goes to the shipping that actually moves the company's goods, so it sits inside its Scope 3 emissions. This is insetting, not offsetting.

When those emissions reductions are verified and recorded once as inset credits, each claim has a clear owner and cannot be counted twice. Credits are issued to the project developer after independent verification, and Carbon3 records them in its registry, giving carriers, cargo owners and auditors the same view of who holds what.

That kind of shared record addresses the data and claims problems the survey highlights, and it helps turn a framework that buyers already trust into something they can use in procurement.

Claim treatment depends on the applicable reporting framework.

Source: Getting to Zero Coalition, Accelerating market participation in maritime book and claim (August 2026).