GHG Protocol

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol is the accounting standard underneath virtually all corporate carbon reporting. It defines how emissions are measured and sorted into Scope 1 (direct), Scope 2 (purchased energy) and Scope 3 (everything in the value chain), and it is what every climate-disclosure regime and carbon-accounting platform ultimately reduces to.

• Three scopes - The Scope 1/2/3 split is the Protocol’s most consequential contribution; it is the reason two companies’ carbon numbers can be compared at all.
• Corporate and product standards - Separate documents for organisational inventories, product life cycles, and value chain accounting.
• A methodology, not a format - There is no machine-readable representation of a GHG Protocol inventory. The standard tells you how to count, not how to serialise the answer.
• Upstream of the regulators - ISO 14064 provides the assurance layer, and ISSB IFRS S2 and the CSRD reporting standards all reference back to it.

For API work the Protocol matters as semantics rather than as a schema. A carbon-accounting API’s fields only mean anything against these definitions, and the absence of an interchange format is exactly why every platform in the space has invented its own. That gap — a universally adopted accounting standard with no machine-readable artifact — is the most interesting thing about the climate data stack.

Industry: Sustainability