By developing a corporate GHG emissions inventory using GHG Protocol, companies identify the sources and magnitude of their GHG emissions which helps them manage risks, uncover opportunities, and plan and track progress toward their decarbonization efforts. GHG Protocol defines what emissions should be measured, how they should be measured, and what information should be reported, covering a company’s operations and value chain across scope 1, scope 2, and scope 3. 

Many companies also influence emissions within and beyond their value chain which may not be reflected in the corporate GHG inventory. For example, companies may invest in emission reduction or removal projects within their value chain, but the specific project impacts may not be directly traced or allocated to the company’s own inventory data. Actions may also include use of market instruments such as chain of custody certificates or carbon credits, investments beyond the company’s value chain, efforts to avoid emissions, among others.  

To address this, GHG Protocol’s Actions and Market Instruments (AMI) workstream is developing a multi-statement reporting structure which will enable companies to completely and transparently report on impacts of actions and market instruments in a credible manner within a corporate GHG report. This new sector-agnostic reporting structure seeks to help mobilize investments in decarbonization, including in hard-to-abate sectors such as steel, chemicals, aviation, shipping, and cement. It intends to address the reporting of low-carbon contractual investments, such as in the electricity sector (e.g., virtual power purchase agreements), biomethane certificates, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), among others. (These examples are illustrative, not exhaustive, and contract types and terminology will vary by commodity and sector.) 

Actions that achieve real climate impacts should be reported, but they must be represented transparently and separately from a company’s physical inventory if they fall outside the inventory boundary, to preserve integrity and enable consistency and comparability in GHG reporting.  

Like financial accounting, GHG Protocol is grounded in accounting principles designed to ensure that reported information provides a faithful, true, and fair representation of a company’s GHG emissions. GHG Protocol’s role is to ensure accurate, complete, consistent, relevant and transparent emissions measurement and reporting.  

Policy decisions about how the resulting numbers are used, whether multiple types of information can be combined, and the eligibility of individual types of actions and market instruments for target setting is up to external target setting programs and policymakers that use GHG Protocol’s standards.  

To develop the Actions and Market Instruments Standard and promote alignment across the GHG accounting, reporting and target setting ecosystem, GHG Protocol has convened a multistakeholder Technical Working Group (TWG) comprised of businesses across sectors, NGOs, academia, governments, GHG programs, and related initiatives such as Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), CDP, the AIM Platform, Value Change Initiative (VCI), the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative (VCMI), and the Task Force for Corporate Action Transparency (TCAT). 

The Actions and Market Instruments workstream is currently producing a Phase 1 White Paper which outlines the purpose, principles and key concepts for multi-statement GHG reporting. To advance development of this, the TWG recently completed a three day in-person workshop in Washington DC. Once revised and approved by the Independent Standards Board (ISB), an updated version of the White Paper will be released, ahead of a targeted public consultation in early 2026. The workstream will also begin Phase 2 in 2026, with a draft standard for public consultation to follow.