A 🦋 in our GHG emissions⁴ protocol

The 🐘 in the climate change room

The Green House Gas Protocol (GHGP) standards identify 3 scopes of emissions:

❶ Direct greenhouse (GHG) emissions that occur from sources that are controlled or owned by an organization
❷ Indirect GHG emissions associated with the purchase of electricity, steam, heat, or cooling
❸ Indirect emissions in the value chain (other than scope 2)

In their sustainability reports and plans, all companies reference these standardized scope 1, 2 and 3 (in most cases) emissions, pledging to reduce them by some percentage and/or compensate for the emissions to achieve “Net Zero”.

Scope 4 emissions

From a given organization’s perspective, 99.999% of global emissions are not under their direct or indirect control: They occur outside their value chain.

Many companies have ideas and initiatives that target such “scope 4” emissions. For example, Telia launched a “Travel Emissions Insights” service that helps customers identify opportunities for reducing their (scope 3) emissions associated with business travel.

That is a great idea, and very instrumental in achieving climate change objectives through emissions reductions. However, the GHG standard protocol does not provide the means for Telia to account for these achievements: Their 2021 sustainability report highlights the initiative (classified as “8:2 Data-driven solutions for GHG emissions reductions” under the recent EU Taxonomy for sustainable activities), and an attempt is made to assess an eligible percentage of Turnover, CAPEX and OPEX KPIs — but it is not measured, nor defined as an explicit target (e.g. “covered by science-based targets”, page 8).

Why not?

Why not enable the definition of explicit targets for companies that address and help reduce emissions which are not under their direct or indirect control? It’s the biggest chunk, a huge addressable market opportunity — and our greatest omission: A bug 🦋 in the GHG protocol.