ICAO's 2050 goal is the top of the stack.
The Long-term Aspirational Goal adopted by the International Civil Aviation Organization commits member states — including Asia-Pacific countries — to net-zero carbon emissions for international aviation by 2050. Everything below it is a way of operationalising that commitment in a specific jurisdiction.
ASEAN's Action Plan is the regional political commitment.
The ASEAN Sustainable Aviation Action Plan (ASAAP), adopted by the 29th ASEAN Transport Ministers Meeting in November 2023 under Singapore's two-year chairmanship of the ASEAN Air Transport Working Group, is a 10-year roadmap shared across the bloc. It sets objectives on capability-building, information exchange, and — starting with SAF — an ASEAN sustainable-aviation roadmap.
APSAC is the regional capability layer.
Political commitment is cheap without technical capacity. APSAC's job, launched in July 2025, is to build that capacity across Asia-Pacific states through three pillars: policy research on cleaner fuels, carbon accounting, carbon markets and green finance; collaborative studies with industry and academia; and hands-on capacity building — starting with the Growing Aviation Sustainably course co-developed with the Singapore Aviation Academy.
The Centre is a Singapore institution with a regional mandate. Its Advisory Council — Airbus, Boeing, Chevron, ExxonMobil, GenZero, IATA, and Neste — is an unusually frank coalition of the sectors whose decisions actually move aviation emissions: airframers, fuel majors, the global airline industry body, and decarbonisation finance.
The Singapore Sustainable Air Hub Blueprint is Singapore's national answer to ASAAP.
Launched by CAAS at the Changi Aviation Summit in February 2024 and submitted to ICAO as Singapore's State Action Plan, the Blueprint is Singapore's domestic counterpart to the ASAAP's regional commitments — covering airport, airline, and air-traffic-management domains, with coalition-building "critical enablers" that map directly to the ASEAN plan. For APSAC, the Blueprint is less a counterpart than a proof-of-concept: the home-state programme APSAC helps other Asia-Pacific states translate into their own contexts.
SAF Target, SAF Levy, and SAFCo are the sharp end.
Singapore's 1% SAF target takes effect in 2027, with the goal of raising it to 3–5% by 2030. A SAF Levy — fixed-cost-envelope, banded by flight distance — is collected on tickets sold from October 2026 and flows into a statutory SAF Fund managed by CAAS.
SAFCo — the Singapore Sustainable Aviation Fuel Company Ltd., set up by CAAS — is the central procurement entity. It runs competitive tenders against CORSIA standards, contracts directly with producers for physical SAF uplifted at Changi, and aggregates voluntary corporate demand alongside the regulated volume. A February 2026 MOU with nine major partners — BCG, Changi Airport Group, DBS Bank, GenZero, Google, OCBC, Temasek, Singapore Airlines, and Scoot — launched its first central-procurement trial.
Why the layering matters.
Each layer is load-bearing in a different way. ICAO provides the deadline. ASEAN provides the political cover. APSAC provides the technical capacity that lets ministries across the region actually write policy that ICAO and ASEAN call for. Singapore's Blueprint provides a concrete proof-of-concept. The SAF instruments provide the market signal.
Without APSAC, the region has commitments without craft. That is the gap the Centre is built to close.
All factual claims above are sourced from the CAAS press release announcing APSAC and from Daniel Ng's April 2026 CAAS keynote, Accelerating Sustainable Aviation Fuel in Singapore. See footer for source links.