Smart Freight Centre – Yinan Feng – 2025

Summary

Yinan Feng authored a demand-side research report and helped organize the launch of China’s Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) Community, accelerating the Smart Freight Centre’s (SFC) SAF promotion efforts in China.

Goals

During her Climate Corps fellowship at SFC, Yinan focused on identifying and addressing demand-side barriers to SAF adoption in China. She aimed to map buyer pain points, consolidate fragmented stakeholders, and develop actionable recommendations to support decarbonization in the air cargo sector and contribute to the carbon neutrality goal.

Solutions

Her approach involved:
Demand-Side Deep Dive: Designed four semi-structured questionnaires and conducted one-on-one interviews with airlines, logistics providers, and cargo owners, producing an insights report.
Stakeholder & Policy Mapping: Delivered a ‘China and Asia SAF Value Chain Map’ and a 2025 SAF Policy Snapshot by Jurisdiction, both based on publicly available information.
Community Launch: Planned and co-hosted the inaugural China SAF Community Roundtable, bringing together professionals from airlines, logistics firms, cargo owners, think tanks, and certification bodies to identify core pain points on the demand side of the SAF market.

Potential Impact

The outputs provide SFC and its partners with a systematic archive of buyer voices in China’s SAF market. By highlighting issues such as high SAF premiums, fragmented certification systems, and a lack of industry training, the work supports the development of pilot SAF procurement platforms, policy white papers, and the promotion of book & claim mechanisms. If the proposed centralized procurement hub and standardized contracts are implemented, they could trigger large-scale SAF procurement agreements, reduce aviation lifecycle CO’ emissions, and advance aviation decarbonization.