The Greenhouse Gas Protocol launched a new guidance this week to help agricultural companies measure and manage their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from crop and livestock production. It is the first such international guidance for the sector, and will help underpin efforts to mitigate agriculture’s environmental impact.

The World Resources Institute unveiled the first ever Agricultural Guidance to help companies measure, manage, and report greenhouse gas emissions from the agriculture sector, including farming, livestock, and land use change. The agriculture sector is responsible for 17 percent of global GHG emissions, including land use change.

Brazil’s farms are major, global producers of beef, soybeans, sugarcane, coffee, rice, and more. Yet they’re also major producers of greenhouse gas emissions. Two new resources aim to reduce the emissions intensity of Brazil’s agricultural sector.

GHG Protocol has released a second draft of its Agricultural Guidance for open comment. The Agricultural Guidance is an international supplement to the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard that aims to customize the latter to the agricultural sector, while addressing the unique challenges posed by the sector - accounting for reversible carbon stocks in soils and biomass, setting and tracking progress toward reduction targets against a background of highly variable emissions, quantifying emissions, etc.

Agriculture is a major actor in spurring global climate change. The sector is already responsible for at least 10-12 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and agricultural emissions are expected to increase by more than 50 percent by 2030.

Agriculture and agriculture-linked land use change contribute almost 80% to Brazil’s national emissions. On September 25 in Sao Paulo, GHG Protocol held an inaugural workshop to engage key stakeholders in developing a set of new tools specific to Brazilian agriculture – a corporate GHG accounting standard and emission factors. The event featured a keynote address by Eduardo Assad, a director at Embrapa and formerly the Brazilian secretary for climate change.

This past Sunday, WRI’s Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol team conducted a session at the Rio+20 event, “The Green Economy: Driving Business Value and Competitiveness.” The session included great dialogue between business leaders, policy makers, and WRI experts, and featured one very significant declaration: The British Ambassador to Brazil, Alan Charlton.

RIO DE JANEIRO (17 June 2012)—The World Resources Institute (WRI) and the British Embassy are launching a two year partnership to measure corporate and farm-level emissions in Brazil. Agricultural emissions account for nearly 20 percent of Brazil’s emissions, with agricultural production on the rise.