All six people on this important panel presentation held at The Cargo Network Services (CNS) Partnership Conference in Dallas, Texas that included Alicia Lines, CNS President; (at Podium) and from right, Cristina Oñate, VP Sustainability & Product, LATAM; Lorenzo Stoll, Head of Cargo, Swiss WorldCargo; Juan Carlos Serna, Head of Airfreight, CH Robinson; James Van Epps, Managing Director, Cargo Security, Customs & DG, Airlines for America; and Robert Horton, Vice President, Environmental Affairs & Sustainability, DFW International Airport knocked the ball out of the stadium with an excellent presentation.
     Here some edited comments:

Christina Oñate VP Sustainability & Product, LATAM declared:
     At LATAM, when it comes to sustainability, we have two main commitments.
     One to be net zero by 2050, and the other one to use 5% of SAF in our operations by 2030, favoring local productions in South America.
     In order to meet our goals, what we're looking at is all the different mechanisms that we could use, all the available tools for decarbonization.
     This includes flight and route optimization, fleet renewal, of course, SAF, and carbon offsets.
     LATAM believe that through collaboration, we could get better results out of all these mechanisms, so we're also seeking collaboration in each of them.

Lorenzo Stoll, Head of Cargo, Swiss WorldCargo was next outlining SWISS efforts toward sustainability:
      Just as at most airlines of the world in 2024, at SWISS we have the goal of getting to net zero by 2050.
     We also have a milestone by 2030, to have cut 50% of our carbon emissions compared to 2019.
     There are a number of things we are doing to reach that goal as well.
     We all know that the biggest source of carbon are the aircraft. So we're investing multi-billion budgets into renewing the fleet.
     So we'll be getting our first 350s soon coming from Airbus.
     SWISS changed our short-haul fleet in the past years to more efficient models, as well.
     So that's one thing.
     We also try to figure out how do we operate more efficiently?
     If you think every kilo of fuel we don't burn when we fly a bit more, or about moving dead weight a bit more efficiently, multiplied by the number of flights, and number of miles, you can end up with good solutions.
     SWISS has developed an approach for all this that internally is referred to as OP-D.
     SWISS looks at all our flight data, everything else as well to develop patterns and models to improve the next flights.
     For example, faced with irregularities, we know in this industry sometimes you need to cancel flights.
     So now when that happens what is the most efficient aircraft you send out? Maybe not a 320, but perhaps 321 would make sense.
     Currently we use Google data and Google Cloud and we see the first effects.
     As for SAF, we're also looking at technology and we're working with a company called SynHelion. It's a Swiss startup coming from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Sturing, or the Swiss equivalent of MIT. A bit better because it's Swiss. (Lorenzo smiled).

Juan Carlos Serna, Head of Airfreight spoke of the efforts of CH Robinson.
     Our mission is to improve the world supply chain. And by having more efficient supply chains across all the elements, we're going to have a more sustainable supply chain.
     I think we're moving west of the supply chain. It's going to allow us to have a more sustainable one.
     And in that, we're working on a multi-dimensional approach. Certainly, we at CH Robinson, we had committed, and we announced that we wanted to reduce our emissions impact by 2025 by 40%.
     In 2023, we were proud to announce that we had reduced by 47%, and we're not stopping there.

James Van Epps, Managing Director, Cargo Security, Customs & DG, Airlines for America said:
     I think the nature of this industry in general is so diverse and dynamic to begin with that there's not a section of the world that we don't touch. And so from that nature of the industry itself we're dynamic and diverse.
     Where I think where we need to kind of help ourselves is we need to, I guess I would challenge everybody in this room, sometime in the next three months, there's a college or university probably within 10 to 20 miles of where you live, to reach out to that university and actually talk with them to see if you can just present on the air cargo industry or the airline industry and just on how their skill set or their degree would apply to the industry itself.
     We need to help ourselves in attracting that talent in to come up with the new ideas and everything else in regard to being able to bring it all together for achieving the sustainability that we've been talking about.

Robert Horton, Vice President, Environmental Affairs & Sustainability, DFW International noted that the host of the 2024 CNS Partnership Conference is, was and continues to be proud as the first carbon-neutral airport in North America eight years ago, achieving that goal in 2016.
     “We are committed to net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.”
     Here are his remarks added to the others as the result of a battery of excellent questions and follow-ups posed to Robert and all the panelists here by CNS President Alicia Lines who, it must be said, conducted a bravura session, easily we think, the best public conversations at CNS Partnership this year.
     “Robert,” Alicia asked, “would you kindly” share with us a bit of the roadmap DFW has designed to be able to get to that very ambitious net zero carbon goal by 2030?”
     “DFW benefited as the state of Texas deregulated the energy market,” Robert said.
     That allowed us to make an investment in purchasing 100% renewable electricity and realizing savings via a 30-year, low-cost arrangement.
     Much of what we invested in initially were things that we control directly, like energy efficiency investments, and transitions to renewable fuels.
     However, things that are outside of our control were dealt with incrementally, so between 2010, which is our baseline year, and last year, we reduced our baseline carbon footprint by 81%.
     Now we must include other elements in our strategy including conversion of our central utility plant, which is responsible for heating, and cooling our campus, to electric, reducing natural gas use by about 80%.
     The U.S. target of 3 billion gallons of SAP production by 2030 is big.
     DFW alone, I think, uses about a billion gallons with the airlines, annually. That number informs the problem.
     DFW is looking to support those initiatives and also the airline initiatives in two ways. Number one, we're looking at how do we reduce the unnecessary consumption of jet fuel, whether it be by taxing time or by looking at putting electrification systems at the gates?
     The second is looking at how do we support SAP.
     So we collect a lot of U.S. cooking oil.
     We're looking at converting what is a waste, organic waste, into sustainable aviation fuels and renewable fuels.
GDA/SSA