GHG Protocol adjusts standards update timelines

The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol is extending the timeline for big updates to its corporate carbon accounting standards, which haven’t seen major revisions for more than a decade.

The extension reflects both the nonprofit’s deepening partnership with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the flood of feedback that GHG Protocol received about proposed changes to the rules for calculated emissions inventories related to purchased electricity, which fall under the Scope 2 category.

GHG Protocol and ISO are aligning their respective standards into a unified framework that corporations can use to calculate their GHG emissions. The goal is to simplify corporate emissions reporting as disclosure regulations come into effect in more jurisdictions — from California and the European Union to Japan and Singapore.  

“The real paradigm is moving from a voluntary system — which is still very much with us today, through things like the Science Based Targets initiative — into this new mandatory world where we’re seeing jurisdiction after jurisdiction take up the mantle of mandatory climate disclosure,” said Tim Mohin, who took over as GHG Protocol’s first CEO on June 1.

What’s affected

Virtually every major organization uses GHG Protocol rules to assess and report their emissions. Its work is developed through a partnership between the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). 

ISO is the world’s largest standards organization; its work reflects 177 member countries.

The ISO-GHG Protocol partnership will align the ISO 14064 series with the GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard. Both methodologies define how corporations should create comprehensive inventories for operational emissions (Scope 1), purchased electricity (Scope 2) and indirect sources including supply chains (Scope 3). 

A public consultation draft for GHG Protocol’s high-level corporate standard was due in the second quarter, but it has been postponed in anticipation of a first draft for the unified standard in the second quarter of 2027, Mohin said. The unified standard is set to take effect in 2028.

GHG Protocol and ISO will follow their existing governance guidelines during the development process for the unified standard, meaning that stakeholders for both organizations will have a say in the final edition.

Updated Scope 2 workstream

Alongside the unification work, GHG Protocol’s Scope 2 technical working group is planning an in-person meeting in September to “reconcile” the close to 1,100 comments it received on proposed changes to the carbon accounting rules that cover electricity, a major source of emissions for many companies. Close to two-thirds of the responses came from corporations, industry groups and sustainability consultants.

“The plurality of the respondents want a more rigorous standard,” Mohin said. At the same time, “there’s a lot of differing opinions on where it should come out.”

The Scope 2 framework covers a dual reporting structure: location-based inventories, which are based on the emissions intensity of the grids where a company operates; and market-based emissions, which also include an organization’s renewable energy contracts.

Themes from the feedback, which GHG Protocol published for review, included:

• Very low support for a proposal that would require corporations to match their electricity consumption on an hourly basis, on the same electricity grid region, in order to claim market-based emissions reductions.  
• Interest in a provision that would only allow companies to make voluntary clean electricity claims if the projects added capacity on grids underserved by renewables.
• An emphasis on feasibility, with many respondents encouraging a phased introduction of the new rules. 

It’s unclear whether another consultation draft of the proposed Scope 2 changes will be published after the technical working group’s meeting, Mohin said.

GHG Protocol plans to align the Scope 2 workstream with the one for the emerging Actions and Market Instruments standard, which proposes methods for companies to report on the emissions-related impact of their investments in climate solutions and their use of mechanisms, such as purchases of sustainable aviation fuel certificates. 

“It’ll get pulled into the overall package,” he said. “A lot of our stakeholders have been asking for exactly that.”

The feedback cycle for the Actions and Market Instruments methodology closed early this year, and GHG Protocol plans to publish a summary in the near future. The first formal draft is due in the third quarter.

The timeline for GHG Protocol’s standard covering corporate value chains, a.k.a. Scope 3, may be updated. The public consultation draft is due in the second half of 2026, but may be adjusted to align with the ISO-GHG Protocol integration work.

Stay tuned

ISO and GHG Protocol are also collaborating on a new standard for a product-level GHG accounting standard that builds on two existing frameworks: ISO 14067 and the GHG Protocol Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard.

The end result will be a co-branded standard, one that will help corporations prepare for the enactment of national carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAMs), such as the one adopted by the EU. CBAMs are a form of import fee that consider the embodied carbon intensity of hard-to-abate materials such as steel.

“We believe that an international standard for the carbon intensity of products is absolutely necessary,” Mohin said. “We also know that the [existing] standard needed a lot of updating and work, and that’s what’s going on today.”

The joint technical working group met in mid-July, but timelines for the joint standard haven’t yet been released.