Context  

Between November 2022 and March 2023, the public was invited to provide feedback on the current suite of corporate standards and guidance and provide suggestions for either maintaining current practices or developing updates and new additional guidance. This feedback covers GHG Protocol’s Corporate Standard, Scope 2 Guidance, Scope 3 Standard, and supporting documents, and will inform the scope of the updates that GHG Protocol makes to its standards and guidance.

Written summaries of the survey responses will be made publicly available on this webpage. GHG Protocol will also share these summaries via email to subscribers. In addition, GHG Protocol will be hosting webinars highlighting the topline findings from each survey. All interested stakeholders are welcome to attend these webinars, and invitations to register for these webinar events will be sent via email to subscribers. If you are interested in receiving email updates from GHG Protocol please subscribe via this form.

Survey Responses

Over the course of the five-month survey period, the GHG Protocol secretariat received over 1,400 survey responses. The GHG Protocol secretariat is currently analyzing these responses and will be sharing survey summaries in the coming weeks. Survey summaries will highlight topline themes and any shared responses will not be attributed to individual respondents.

• Survey on Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard: 375 responses
  • Topline Findings from Corporate Standard & Scope 3 Surveys - YouTube
• Survey on Scope 2 Guidance: 403 responses
  • GHG Protocol Standards Update Process: Topline Findings from Scope 2 Feedback - YouTube
  • GHG Protocol Releases Summary of Scope 2 Guidance Survey Feedback | GHG Protocol
    • Scope 2 Survey Feedback Executive Summary
    • Full Scope 2 Survey Feedback Draft Summary
• Survey on Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard and Scope 3 Calculation Guidance: 354 responses
  • Topline Findings from Corporate Standard & Scope 3 Surveys - YouTube
• Survey on market-based accounting approaches: 343 responses

For more information about the survey process please refer to GHG Protocol’s survey memo.

Proposal Submissions

As part of the survey process, respondents were also able to submit proposals for potential updates, amendments, or additional guidance to the Corporate Standard, Scope 2 Guidance, Scope 3 Standard, or Scope 3 Calculation Guidance, or to provide justification for maintaining a current approach on a given topic. Proposals were not required to complete any of the four surveys.

Respondents had the option to request their proposal be shared publicly, and to request anonymity for their proposal. Proposals that requested anonymity have the “personal information” section removed. The GHG Protocol secretariat received over 230 proposals, with over 150 requesting to be shared publicly. If you are interested in seeing all the public proposals, you can view them here, or you can explore proposals that address a specific topic:

• Corporate Standard proposals
• Scope 2 proposals
• Scope 3 proposals
• Market-based accounting proposals
• General/cross-cutting proposals

Next Steps

The GHG Protocol secretariat is now in the process of reviewing and analyzing the survey submissions and proposals and developing specific workplans for each survey workstream (Corporate Standard, Scope 2, Scope 3, and market-based accounting). The GHG Protocol has a two-year timeline for its standards update process. The official start of this process will be informed by planned restructuring of GHG Protocol’s governance. In sync with the initial governance set-up, GHG Protocol expects to release drafts of revised text in 2024 and final standards/guidance in 2025. More information, including specific timelines for each workstream, will be shared in the coming months via email to subscribers and will be posted on GHG Protocol’s standards update process webpage.