Carbon Accounting Landscape

Connection between Carbon Footprint of Products (PCFs) and corporate emission accounting

As companies advance their climate ambitions, carbon accounting has become a critical foundation for measuring progress, setting targets, and driving decarbonization across value chains. A growing number of standards and frameworks guide how greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are quantified, reported, and exchanged. While some focus on corporate inventories and climate targets, others provide methodologies for calculating the carbon footprint of individual products.

At the same time, the carbon accounting landscape is evolving. In 2025, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol) launched a strategic partnership to harmonize their greenhouse gas accounting frameworks and create a more consistent global approach to emissions reporting. As part of this initiative, both organizations are developing a future generation of jointly governed standards for corporate and product carbon accounting, reflecting the growing need for globally aligned methodologies and interoperable data across value chains. 

Corporate emissions accounting

Corporate carbon accounting provides the basis for climate reporting, target setting, and disclosure.

Today, the GHG Protocol remains the most widely used framework for organizational greenhouse gas accounting. Its suite of standards includes the Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard and the Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard, which establishes requirements for quantifying emissions across upstream and downstream value chains. Given that Scope 3 emissions often represent the majority of a company’s footprint, this standard has become central to supplier engagement and value-chain decarbonization.

ISO 14064-1 provides internationally recognized requirements for quantifying and reporting organizational greenhouse gas emissions and removals and is widely used in assurance and verification processes.

Looking ahead, these frameworks are expected to converge. ISO and GHG Protocol are developing a single harmonized global corporate standard that will integrate the Corporate Standard, Scope 2 Guidance, Scope 3 Standard, Actions & Market Instruments guidance, and ISO 14064-1 into one coherent framework for future corporate carbon accounting.

GHG Protocol Announces Key Standard Development Updates 

Additional frameworks address specific aspects of corporate climate management:

• Land Sector and Removals Standard (WBCSD, 2026): accounting and reporting of land-based emissions, removals, carbon storage, and biomass-related impacts.
• SBTi Near-Term Criteria: requirements for science-based emission reduction targets.
• SBTi FLAG Criteria: dedicated guidance for forest, land and agriculture emissions.
• SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard 2.0: framework for long-term net-zero target setting and transition planning.

Product Carbon Footprints

Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs) provide transparency on greenhouse gas emissions associated with a product throughout its life cycle and increasingly serve as the foundation for Scope 3 data exchange between suppliers and customers.

ISO 14067 is the globally recognized standard for quantifying product carbon footprints and builds on life cycle assessment principles established in ISO 14040 and ISO 14044. The standard is currently under revision to reflect evolving best practices and market needs. 

ISO 14077, currently under development, is expected to provide requirements and guidelines for incorporating Chain of Custody (CoC) models into Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approaches. It will connect the Chain-of-Custody terminology and models defined in ISO 22095 with the established LCA frameworks of ISO.

Industry- specific guidelines complement these international standards:

• Together for Sustainability (TfS) PCF Guideline v3.0, the leading methodology for the chemical industry, providing harmonized rules for cradle-to-gate PCF calculation and Scope 3 integration. 
• WBCSD Partnership for Carbon Transparency (PACT) Methodology Framework v3.0, enabling the standardized exchange of supplier-specific product carbon footprints across value chains and digital platforms.  

In line with these standards and guidelines, we transparently report our cradle-to-gate Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs) both with and without biogenic CO₂ removals and emissions. These two approaches are commonly referred to as the −1/+1 (including biogenic CO2) and 0/0 (excluding biogenic CO2) approaches. In addition, we report both the total carbon content and the biogenic carbon content of our products. The −1/+1 approach makes the climate benefit of bio-based feedstocks directly visible in cradle-to-gate PCF results. In corporate greenhouse gas inventories, the climate benefit of of switching from fossil-based to bio-based feedstocks is accounted for in scope 3.12. end-of-life treatment of sold products. 

This transparency provides the information needed to support different applications, including further ISO-conform PCF calculations as well as corporate greenhouse gas accounting.