GHG Protocol Corporate Standard

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.

The GHG Protocol has been criticised for not including in its guiding principals the need for emission reports to be comparable across companies. 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. 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.

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.

• 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).

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:

• ISO 14064-1, published by the International Organization for Standardization, aligns closely with the GHG Protocol's scope definitions and inventory principles, and in 2025 the two organisations announced a formal partnership to produce unified co-branded standards.

• 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.

• 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.

• The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and IFRS S2 climate disclosure standards both assume GHG Protocol-aligned emissions data as an input to financial reporting.

Organisation

The GHG Protocol was launched in 1998 and introduced in 2001.

References