Dive Brief:
- The Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the International Organization for Standardization will work to combine their carbon emissions accounting standards into a single global standard, GHG Protocol announced Wednesday.
- The move will consolidate the GHG Protocol’s scope 1, 2 and 3 standards and guidance in its Action and Market Instruments workstream with ISO’s 14064-1 greenhouse gas accounting standard, according to a July 29 press release.
- ISO and GHG Protocol announced a strategic partnership in September 2025, and the harmonization of the group’s carbon accounting standards was part of the COP30 action plan introduced last year, and is expected to continue through the 2028 Global Stocktake.
Dive Insight:
The announcement comes a month after ISO debuted its standard for developing net-zero transition plans and after GHG Protocol named former Boston Consulting Group executive Tim Mohin as its first CEO in April.
The finalized accounting standard will be jointly published and co-branded by both organizations, according to a standard development plan released Wednesday. A draft of the consolidated standard is expected in the second quarter of 2027 for public consultation, and a finalized joint corporate standard in the fourth quarter of 2028, according to a FAQ page GHG Protocol posted Wednesday.
The standard setting organizations plan to segment the guidance into two parts. The first part of the updated and consolidated standard will concern general requirements and physical greenhouse gas inventory, while the second part will look at action and market instruments, according to the standard development plan.
GHG Protocol said on the FAQ page that the combined corporate accounting standard is being designed with goals to “reduce fragmentation, increase interoperability, and provide organizations worldwide with a single trusted foundation for climate reporting and decision-making.”
Mohin — who served as CEO of another target-setting organization, the Global Reporting Initiative, from 2017-2020 — said in the release that a consolidated standard is “a significant step toward integrating and harmonizing greenhouse gas accounting across the world.”
“For the organizations applying these standards to measure their greenhouse gas emissions, a single corporate standard will simplify reporting, reduce duplication, and provide greater consistency across markets and jurisdictions,” Mohin said. “This will in turn allow companies to spend more time reducing emissions.”
GHG Protocol also released public feedback from its proposed scope 2 standard revision on Wednesday. The public consultation received more than 1,100 responses and the carbon accounting standard setter said it is exploring multiple reporting approaches “that reflect how different theories of change could best respond” to the range of feedback received.
