IATA has called on the air cargo industry to adopt a multilayered safety approach for the transport of dangerous goods, arguing that no single control measure can adequately manage the risks posed by lithium batteries, flammable liquids and other hazardous cargoes moving through global air freight networks.

The airline industry association laid out its position in a call directed at carriers, freight forwarders, ground handlers and shippers, urging each layer of the supply chain to take responsibility for dangerous goods compliance rather than relying on any one checkpoint to catch non-compliant or undeclared shipments.

The push comes as air cargo volumes of dangerous goods continue to grow, driven in large part by e-commerce flows of lithium-ion batteries and battery-powered consumer electronics. Misdeclared or improperly packed battery shipments remain a persistent fire risk on both freighter and passenger aircraft, and regulators have stepped up enforcement actions against shippers and forwarders that fail to follow packing, labeling and documentation rules.

Under the multilayered framework IATA advocates, safety controls should operate independently at multiple stages: at shipper level, where cargo must be correctly classified, packed, marked and declared; at forwarder level, where acceptance checks should verify documentation and packaging integrity; and at carrier and ground-handler level, where loading, storage and segregation procedures must prevent incompatible goods from traveling together.

The rationale, according to the industry body, is that any single layer can fail — through error, oversight or deliberate misdeclaration — so redundancy across the chain is the only reliable way to keep hazardous cargoes from endangering aircraft and crew.

For shippers, the message carries commercial weight. Non-compliance with dangerous goods regulations can ground shipments, trigger fines and expose companies to carrier blacklisting. For forwarders, acceptance checks represent both a compliance obligation and a liability exposure when misdeclared cargo slips through. For carriers, effective screening and handling of dangerous goods protects aircraft, crews and schedules from the disruption a battery fire incident in a hold or on a freighter deck can cause.

IATA's dangerous goods regulations, updated annually, form the baseline standard that most carriers and regulators reference when drafting their own rules, and the association's guidance on lithium batteries in particular has tightened over successive editions as incident reports accumulated.

The call for layered controls also aligns with growing regulatory scrutiny of e-commerce air freight, where high-volume, small-parcel flows have made manual inspection of every consignment impractical and pushed the industry toward risk-based screening and data-driven targeting of suspicious declarations.

Looking ahead, shippers and forwarders should expect IATA and national regulators to keep tightening dangerous goods requirements — particularly around lithium battery classification, state-of-charge limits and e-commerce declaration standards — as the industry moves toward embedding redundancy and data verification into every layer of the air cargo chain.