Responsible for an estimated 75 percent of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, cities represent the single greatest opportunity for tackling climate change. The first step for cities to realize their potential is to identify and measure where their emissions come from -- you can’t cut what you don’t count.

GHG Protocol is working to give cities the standards and tools they need to measure their emissions, build more effective emissions reduction strategies, set measurable and more ambitious emission reduction goals, and to track their progress more accurately and comprehensively.

The standard can help governments set emission-reduction targets, meet domestic and international emissions reporting obligations to groups like the UNFCCC, and ensure that efforts to reduce emissions are achieving their intended results.

The Project Protocol provides specific principles, concepts, and methods for quantifying and reporting GHG reductions—i.e., the decreases in GHG emissions, or increases in removals and/or storage—from climate change mitigation projects (GHG projects).

Analysts at both the national and local levels can evaluate the GHG impacts of specific policies to improve their effectiveness in reducing emissions and inform where to invest resources to achieve the best results. 

For easy reading on your computer, notebook, tablet, or handheld device, click to download the electronic version of the Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard. This version provides hyperlinks between the standards text, tables and images. Please note that the page numbers vary slightly between the original and electronic versions. When citing specific page numbers, please note when you are referring to the electronic version text.

The standard covers the accounting and reporting of seven greenhouse gases covered by the Kyoto Protocol – carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) and nitrogen trifluoride (NF3). It was updated in 2015 with the Scope 2 Guidance, which allows companies to credibly measure and report emissions from purchased or acquired electricity, steam, heat, and cooling.