What is the Sustainable Airlines Initiative (SAI)?

The Sustainable Airlines Initiative (SAI) was founded in early 2023 by Air France KLM, Transavia, Delta Air Lines, and Virgin Atlantic. It is a purpose-driven group of commercial aviation companies independent of any global airline alliance. By pooling efforts via the EcoVadis platform, the members seek to improve their ethical, social and environmental business standards across the industry’s value chain and spark systemic transformation toward supply chain transparency. The members believe that harmonizing standards is the most efficient way to scale improvement.

The SAI is coordinated by EcoVadis. After the launch in early 2023, the group’s next step is to actively educate their procurement teams on the importance of this collaboration to address the burning sustainability challenges of the industry in the fastest possible way. This includes the value creation partners in the vertical and horizontal supply chain and is not limited to GHG emissions reductions but to other social and environmental topics as well. The decision to collaborate on their supply chain sustainability program and enroll suppliers into the program as an industry is based on the experience that the challenges ahead are big, the window of time to act is narrowing, and the most effective solution is joining efforts.

The Sustainable Airlines Initiative will complete the project's design phase in S1, 2023 and is actively inviting airlines that fit the vision and mission and share the ambitions to join in the second wave. You can contact sectorinitiatives@ecovadis.com or your key EcoVadis contact person for more information.

To learn more about the benefits of a sector initiative to a rated company: What are the benefits of sector initiatives?