In the fourth quarter (Q4), shippers renew their contracts with carriers and forwarders for next year, and this is the tender season. A new requirement now appears in the tender documents: a request for emissions data that is structured and documents the calculation method. Two years ago this requirement was not there. Today, price and transit time are no longer the only questions.
Why this is happening now
We have written before about why freight carriers must provide data that others can use. Shippers that fall under CSRD, the EU sustainability reporting law, must report their Scope 3 Category 4 emissions. These are the emissions from the freight they buy. An assurance team, the independent reviewer of the report, must be able to check these figures. As a result, a spend-based estimate from a carrier, which is calculated from money spent and not from real activity, no longer meets that need.
What has changed since then is that the requirement is no longer only a topic of discussion. It is now written into the tender documents, and shippers are issuing documents this quarter that score it for next year's contracts.
What the tenders specifically ask for
The requests we see have the same four parts. They come from a shipper's procurement team, or from a forwarder who passes the requirement on to the carriers it books:
- A named method: ISO 14083, the international standard for freight emissions, and the GLEC Framework, the industry guide to applying it. A general statement such as "we calculate our carbon footprint" is not enough.
- Data quality tier disclosure. The bidder says whether the figure comes from real fuel receipts or from a regional default value.
- Data for each shipment, not an annual average for the whole company. The shipper needs this to assign emissions to the goods that really move through its supply chain.
- A format the shipper can use in its own CSRD process without changing it. A GLEC Declaration is such a format, which is a standard "carbon receipt" that a carrier attaches to a shipment. Shippers expect it more and more, instead of a custom PDF.
None of this is unusual. It is the same shared problem seen from the shipper, forwarder and carrier side, and now it is written into contract language.
What this means for carriers and forwarders bidding this season
Price and transit time used to be the whole scorecard. Now data quality is also scored in a growing share of the RFPs that arrive this quarter. It is no longer an optional question at the end of the form. A carrier can answer with a named method, a stated data quality tier and a figure for each shipment. That carrier answers what the bid really asks. In contrast, a carrier that offers only an industry-average estimate answers less than the bid asks, and the score shows it. This is not a distant risk: procurement teams and their carrier partners face it now, in this tender cycle.
Primary data means measured data from real operations. Carriers that already collect it under a shared standard do not need to build an answer for this bid, because they already have one.
What forwarders managing multi-carrier networks can do
A forwarder that bids on a shipper's tender is only as strong as the weakest data answer from its carriers. Asking every carrier on every lane for a consistent figure with a documented method, one by one, takes too much time. It does not work for this quarter's tenders, and it will not work for next year's. The best-placed forwarders already know, for every carrier they book, which method was used. They also know which data quality tier supports the number. As a result, they do not need to ask each time.
How CO2Path is built for this
CO2Path produces what this season's RFPs ask for: a figure for each shipment, calculated under ISO 14083 and GLEC. CO2Path attaches the method and the data quality tier every time, in the same way for every customer and every bid. A carrier or forwarder that uses CO2Path does not have to write a special response to each tender. Instead, it produces the answer that the tender asks for as part of its normal work.
CO2Path helps you answer this season's RFP data requirements → Request a demo