In an effort to create the first worldwide standard for businesses to measure, report, and monitor greenhouse gas emissions and CO2 removals from agricultural land usage, GHG Protocol, a provider of GHG reporting frameworks, announced the release of its new Land Sector and Removals (LSR) Standard.
The World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) created the GHG Protocol in 1997 in order to create extensive, globally standardized frameworks for measuring and managing GHG emissions from value chains, public and private sectors operations, and mitigation measures. The European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), which underpin the CSRD law, and the ISSB standards of the IFRS Foundation are two significant worldwide sustainability reporting frameworks that incorporate and reference the GHG Protocol's criteria.
According to the GHG Protocol, the new standard intends to close a significant gap in emissions reporting. Until now, businesses lacked a reliable and consistent way to report GHG emissions and CO2 removals from land use. The land sector, which includes agriculture, forestry, and other areas, accounts for about 22% of global GHG emissions, and the global land sink currently removes about 30% of annual anthropogenic net CO2 emissions.
In order for businesses with substantial land-sector activities in their operations or value chain to comply with the GHG Protocol framework, the new requirement will go into effect at the beginning of January 2027.
Land use change emissions related to land conversion and deforestation, impacts related to land use and leakage due to global land use dynamics, emissions and removals from ongoing land management practices, biogenic emissions related to the use of agricultural products, lifecycle emissions and removals from food, fiber, feed, and bioenergy products across the value chain, CO2 removals across natural climate solutions and CO2 removal technologies, CO2 capture and storage in geologic reservoirs, and carbon storage in long-lived products derived from CO2 removals are some of the new standard.
The GHG Protocol states that over 300 external reviewers, over 4,000 public comments, and pilot testing by 96 enterprises and supporting partners were all part of the five-year worldwide multistakeholder governance process that produced the new standard. The organization identified two complicated issues that its Independent Standards Board (ISB) deals with: forest carbon accounting and agricultural leakage, or emissions that happen when a company's actions shift food or feed production to lands outside of their operations or value chain.
The GHG Protocol decided that forest carbon accounting would not be included in its initial version of the LSR Standard in order to avoid a delay in the standard's release. However, the new standard does address agricultural leakage, requiring companies involved in activities with a high risk of agricultural leakage to account for and separately report these impacts. A Request for Information is scheduled to be issued soon to collect stakeholder input on how forest carbon accounting can best be included in a future update of the standard.
