Impact
How Water Roads measures a service's impact: the method it publishes, the carbon each trip avoids, and the income that carbon earns.
Water Roads publishes what it can support and says plainly what it cannot: no route has launched, so everything below is a method and a projection, not a measured result. Every trip a vessel carries, in place of a car trip or a diesel-ferry trip, is a unit of carbon avoided, calculated by mechanism rather than assumed. Every tonne avoided is also a tonne of carbon income, on a method that is published even where a price is not.
How Water Roads measures its impact
Water Roads uses its own framework, the Water Roads Environmental Index. The index scores a service across three pillars: Environmental, weighted 40 per cent; Social, 40 per cent; and Governance, 20 per cent.
A weighting describes how Water Roads scores itself, not a current result.
- Environmental — 40 per cent
- The direct environmental performance of running the service: emissions, energy use, and the condition of the waterway a route runs on.
- Social — 40 per cent
- The service's effect on people: accessibility for passengers, and the communities a route runs through.
- Governance — 20 per cent
- How Water Roads oversees and discloses this performance — the standards it reports against, and how that reporting would be verified.
The standards it is designed against
The index is designed against the International Sustainability Standards Board's IFRS S1 and S2, the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and EU Taxonomy, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It also draws on the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard, the GHG Protocol for Project Accounting, ISO 14064-2, Verra VCS, Gold Standard and the International Maritime Organization's Net-Zero Framework.
The index is designed to measure every trip as it occurs, with provenance from vessel movement to credit retirement. It has not yet been audited in service, and this page will say so until it has.
This is a statement of design alignment, not a compliance claim. Water Roads designs its index against these standards; it does not yet report under any of them, and nothing on this site states otherwise.
What is measured
The measures under each pillar draw on operational records, not surveys or estimates: energy supplier contracts, charging logs, underwater noise monitoring, procurement audits and ticketing data. Naming a measure and its evidence source says how Water Roads will measure — it does not commit Water Roads to a number the measure must reach.
Under Environmental: GHG emissions, renewable energy share, energy efficiency and marine noise. Under Social: accessibility, modal shift and community connectivity — accessibility is measured against the vessel’s compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act and terminal compliance with AS 1428, not against a percentage target. Under Governance: sustainable procurement, ESG reporting transparency and stakeholder engagement.
The six goals this maps to
The index maps to six UN Sustainable Development Goals, each by mechanism rather than by figure.
- SDG 7 — Affordable and Clean Energy
- The vessels run on grid electricity rather than diesel, and the framework tracks the renewable share of that electricity supply.
- SDG 9 — Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
- The vessel technology and the route-optimisation platform behind it are new transit infrastructure built on a waterway a city already has.
- SDG 10 — Reduced Inequalities
- A transit option on a waterway a city already has can extend service to places a road or rail network reaches less well.
- SDG 11 — Sustainable Cities and Communities
- The model adds transit capacity without new road or rail construction, on a waterway already present in the city.
- SDG 13 — Climate Action
- Displacing car and diesel-ferry trips with a zero-direct-emission vessel is the mechanism behind the network carbon projection below.
- SDG 14 — Life Below Water
- Reduced wake and lower underwater noise are how the service is designed to lessen its effect on the waterway itself.
What the vessels do to a waterway
- Wake
- Each vessel cuts wake by 90 per cent against a conventional ferry, reducing shoreline erosion along the route.
- Energy
- The vessels run on more than 80 per cent less energy than a conventional diesel ferry.
- Emissions
- Zero direct emissions in operation, a consequence of electric propulsion rather than diesel.
- Underwater noise
- Lower underwater noise than a diesel vessel produces, because there is no combustion engine running.
- Spill risk
- No fuel or lubricant spill risk, because there is no fuel aboard.
The carbon projection
Each trip a Water Roads vessel carries avoids carbon by one of three independently calculated mechanisms: displacing a car trip, displacing a less efficient diesel-ferry trip, or, at the network level, the construction carbon avoided when a water route substitutes for a road tunnel or rail line that does not get built. The figures opposite are those three mechanisms totalled across the network. Source: WRR-ESG-001, “Quantified Carbon Impact” and “Looking Forward”.
6.0 million tonnes
CO₂ cumulative, 2027 to 2040, across the network
1.5 million tonnes
CO₂ a year at the 2040 run rate, across the network
1.2 billion
annual passengers at network maturity, across 48 cities
This is a network projection across 48 cities, not a measured result — no Water Roads route has launched. A route-level figure for Sydney is not published here: it depends on reconciling the report’s modelling with the Sydney service design, and will be added once that is done. The assumptions behind the projection are on Research, under “Carbon and renewables”.
Every tonne in that projection is also a tonne of carbon income: Water Roads’ financial model earns revenue from the carbon credits these avoided emissions generate. The calculation method is published on The model, under “Carbon income” — the report gives no carbon-credit price or valuation, and neither appears on this page or anywhere else on this site.