TL;DR: The Sea Cargo Charter is a voluntary framework through which charterers and cargo owners measure and publicly disclose how the climate performance of their chartering activity aligns with decarbonisation trajectories, including the IMO's ambitions. Signatories collect voyage-level fuel and distance data for the ships they charter, calculate emissions intensity, compare it against the trajectory for each ship type, and publish an annual alignment score. Signing is easy; the data is the commitment: the framework effectively obliges a charterer to know, per voyage, what its chartered tonnage emitted.
What is the Sea Cargo Charter?
The Sea Cargo Charter is an industry framework, developed by leading charterers with the Global Maritime Forum, for assessing and disclosing the climate alignment of chartering activities. It is the charterer-side sibling of the Poseidon Principles, which do the same job for ship-finance portfolios. Membership spans commodity houses, industrial cargo owners and operators who charter tonnage at scale.
The idea is simple accountability: if you charter ships, the emissions of those voyages are your business activity, and the Charter gives a standard way to measure them and say publicly how they compare with where shipping needs to be.
How alignment works
A positive score means chartering activity emitted more than the trajectory allows; alignment or better means it is on or ahead of the curve. The score moves with real choices: which ships are fixed, how they are operated, and what fuels they burn.
What signing actually commits you to
The signature is the easy part. The operational commitment is data: a signatory needs voyage-level fuel and distance figures for every chartered voyage, from vessels it does not operate, consistent enough to aggregate and defensible enough to publish. That is the same data foundation as Scope 3 Category 4 reporting and the same allocation challenge the EEOI method addresses for shared voyages, which is the good news: one validated voyage dataset serves the Charter, the GHG Protocol and CSRD at once, rather than three parallel collection exercises. Much of the underlying fuel data is the same material ships already report under IMO DCS.
Why it matters commercially
The Charter turns chartering emissions from an internal metric into a published score, and published scores create pressure in both directions: cargo owners choose counterparties partly on alignment, and financiers read the same disclosures through the Poseidon Principles lens. For a charterer, the practical consequence is that vessel selection now carries a disclosure dimension: the efficiency of the ship you fix shows up in next year's published number.
ZeroNorth Scope 3 Reporting supports Sea Cargo Charter reporting with the voyage-level inputs the framework requires, calculated for any vessel from validated operational data.
The bottom line
The Sea Cargo Charter is climate accountability sized for charterers: measure the chartered fleet's emissions per voyage, compare them with the trajectory, publish the score. The signature takes a day; the capability it implies, trustworthy voyage-level emissions for ships you do not operate, is the real project, and it is the same capability every other disclosure regime now asks for. Book a demo to see Charter-ready reporting from one dataset.
