Earth:GHG Protocol Corporate Standard

From HandWiki
Greenhouse Gas Protocol
Formation1998
CEO
Tim Mohin
Websitehttps://ghgprotocol.org/
Short description: Initiative for global standardisation of greenhouse gas reporting

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Standard (GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard) is an initiative for the global standardisation of emission of greenhouse gases in order that corporate entities should measure, quantify, and report their own emission levels, so that global emissions are made manageable. The relevant gases, described by the 11 December 1997 Kyoto Protocol, implemented 16 February 2005, are: carbon dioxide, hydrofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide, nitrogen trifluoride, perfluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride.

The protocol itself is under the management of the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.[1][2][3][4][5]

The GHG Protocol has been criticised for not including in its guiding principals the need for emission reports to be comparable across companies.[6] Nonetheless, it has become the de facto standard for corporate carbon footprinting thanks, in part, to organizers' persistent efforts to prevent competing standards from emerging.[7] In 2025, GHG Protocol and International Organization for Standardization entered into a formal partnership to produce new, co-branded standards to replace analogous standards in both organisations.[8]


Accounting framework

The GHG Protocol Corporate Standard organises emissions into three categories, referred to as "scopes," based on the relationship between the reporting company and the emissions source.

  • Scope 1 covers direct emissions from sources owned or controlled by the reporting organisation, such as fuel combustion in boilers, company vehicles, and fugitive refrigerant releases.
  • Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, steam, heat, or cooling consumed by the organisation. The standard requires companies to report using both the location-based method (using average grid emission factors) and the market-based method (using contractual instruments such as energy attribute certificates) where supplier-specific data is available.[9]
  • Scope 3 covers all other indirect emissions that occur in a company's value chain, upstream and downstream. The GHG Protocol Scope 3 Standard, published in 2011, defines fifteen categories of Scope 3 emissions, ranging from purchased goods and services (Category 1) to investments (Category 15).[10]

Accounting principles

The Corporate Standard is built on five principles that govern how emissions inventories should be constructed:

  1. Relevance — the inventory should reflect the greenhouse gas emissions of the company and serve the decision-making needs of users.
  2. Completeness — all sources and activities within the chosen inventory boundary should be accounted for.
  3. Consistency — consistent methodologies should be used to allow meaningful comparisons over time.
  4. Transparency — assumptions and accounting methodologies should be clearly disclosed.
  5. Accuracy — emissions should not be systematically over- or under-stated.

Relationship to other standards

The GHG Protocol Corporate Standard is the methodological foundation for several downstream reporting frameworks:

  • The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) requires companies setting emissions reduction targets to use the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard as the basis for their emissions inventory.[12]
  • The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and its associated European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS E1) reference the GHG Protocol scope definitions for corporate climate disclosure within the European Union.[13]

Organisation

The GHG Protocol was launched in 1998[14] and introduced in 2001.[15]

References

  1. ↑ "Corporate Standard". GHG Protocol, World Resources Institute, World Business Council for Sustainable Development. https://ghgprotocol.org/corporate-standard. ""provides requirements and guidance for companies and other organizations preparing a corporate-level GHG emissions inventory"" 
  2. ↑ "About Us". GHG Protocol, WRI, WBCSD. https://ghgprotocol.org/about-us. ""private and public sector operations, value chains and mitigation actions"" 
  3. ↑ "GHG Protocol Learning Management System". GHG Protocol, WRI, WBCSD. https://ghgprotocol.lambdastore.net/. 
  4. ↑ "Terms of Use". GHG Protocol, WRI, WBCSD. https://ghgprotocol.org/terms-use. 
  5. ↑ "United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change". United Nations. https://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol. 
  6. ↑ Gillenwater, Michael (2022-01-02). "Examining the impact of GHG accounting principles". Carbon Management 13 (1): 550–553. doi:10.1080/17583004.2022.2135238. ISSN 1758-3004. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17583004.2022.2135238. 
  7. ↑ Green, Jessica F. (2010). "Private Standards in the Climate Regime: The Greenhouse Gas Protocol" (in en). Business and Politics 12 (3): 1–37. doi:10.2202/1469-3569.1318. ISSN 1369-5258. https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1369525800002990/type/journal_article. 
  8. ↑ "ISO and GHG Protocol announce strategic partnership to deliver unified global standards for greenhouse gas emissions accounting" (in en). 2025-09-09. https://www.iso.org/news/2025/09/iso-and-ghgp-partnership. 
  9. ↑ "Scope 2 Guidance". GHG Protocol. https://ghgprotocol.org/scope_2_guidance. 
  10. ↑ "Scope 3 Standard". GHG Protocol. https://ghgprotocol.org/scope-3-standard. 
  11. ↑ "ISO and GHG Protocol announce strategic partnership". ISO. 9 September 2025. https://www.iso.org/news/2025/09/iso-and-ghgp-partnership. 
  12. ↑ "SBTi Corporate Manual". Science Based Targets initiative. https://sciencebasedtargets.org/resources/files/SBTi-Corporate-Manual.pdf. 
  13. ↑ "ESRS E1 Climate Change". European Commission. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32023L2772. 
  14. ↑ "The GHG Protocol: A corporate reporting and accounting standard (revised edition)". World Business Council for Sustainable Development. https://www.wbcsd.org/Programs/Climate-and-Energy/Climate/Resources/A-corporate-reporting-and-accounting-standard-revised-edition. "The Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative is a multi-stakeholder partnership of businesses, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), governments, and others convened by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a U.S.-based environmental NGO, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), a Geneva-based coalition of 170 international companies." 
  15. ↑ Kaplan, Robert S.; Ramanna, Karthik (12 April 2022). "We Need Better Carbon Accounting. Here's How to Get There.". Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2022/04/we-need-better-carbon-accounting-heres-how-to-get-there. 



Retrieved from "https://handwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Earth:GHG_Protocol_Corporate_Standard&oldid=4422036"