The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol has released its Land Sector and Removals (LSR) Guidance, a companion resource designed to provide companies with practical instructions on how to account for and report greenhouse gas emissions and carbon dioxide removals from agricultural land use and emerging carbon removal technologies.
The LSR Guidance serves as an implementation manual for the overarching LSR Standard, which defines the formal accounting and reporting requirements, recommendations, and options for corporate inventories. The newly issued text contains worked examples, technical equations, and calculation workflows. It also features 10 corporate case studies from major global brands, including Mars, PepsiCo, and General Mills, to demonstrate practical application across different supply chain operations.
Matt Ramlow, Land Sector and Removals Lead at the GHG Protocol, stated that the guidance is intended to act as a user guide covering the execution phase of reporting, aligning with the organisation’s priority to simplify carbon accounting processes for corporate users.
To provide further implementation support, the GHG Protocol has simultaneously published two supplemental tools: a sample reporting template and a comprehensive reporting requirements checklist.
The organisation also launched a Request for Information (RFI) focused on the technicalities of forest carbon accounting. The RFI aims to gather proposals on how to establish a robust and practical framework given the diverse viewpoints across the sector. The feedback will be used to brief the GHG Protocol’s governance bodies before final decisions on the methodology are made. Stakeholders have until 1 February 2027 to submit input. Alongside the RFI, the organisation plans to explore complementary collaborative approaches to advance consensus on forest accounting.
Both the LSR Standard and the LSR Guidance will formally take effect on 1 January 2027, giving companies a preparation window to align their data systems. The development of the resources involved an extensive global consultation process with scientists, government representatives, and civil society experts, which included feedback from more than 300 external reviewers and pilot testing conducted across 96 companies.
The combined framework is intended to enhance the consistency and comparability of global corporate climate reporting by establishing standardized parameters for tracking agricultural land-use sources and carbon sinks.
