Geospatial Methods for Corporate GHG Accounting of Deforestation and Land Occupation

This guidebook, produced by the World Resources Institute and partners, provides a standardized, geospatially based methodology for companies to estimate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from deforestation and land occupation driven by agricultural expansion. It aims to reduce the inconsistencies in corporate reporting that arise from the flexibility of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol's Land Sector and Removals Guidance (LSRG).

• The guidebook introduces a standardized methodology using spatial datasets to create globally consistent emission factors for land use change (LUC) driven by agricultural expansion. This is intended to resolve inconsistencies where companies sourcing the same commodities from the same supply chains report different GHG emissions due to varied data and method selections.
• The current methodology specifically focuses on calculating GHG emissions from deforestation—defined as the loss of tall, woody vegetation with a tree canopy density of 10 percent or more—and associated soil carbon emissions. Because it focuses on deforestation, emissions for crops that primarily replace nonforest ecosystems, such as rice, wheat, soybean, and maize, may be systematically underestimated.
• The methodology is designed to align with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol's draft Land Sector and Removals Guidance (LSRG) from September 2022, providing a more operationalized approach to reporting scope 1 and scope 3 land use change-related metrics.
• To ensure transparency and comparability, the project provides open-source methods and precalculated tables of yield factors and deforestation emission factors, which are detailed in an accompanying technical note by Fitts et al. 2025.

APA

World Resources Institute (n.d.). Geospatial Methods for Corporate GHG Accounting of Deforestation and Land Occupation. https://www.wri.org/research/geospatial-methods-corporate-ghg-accounting-deforestation-and-land-occupation

Chicago

World Resources Institute. Geospatial Methods for Corporate GHG Accounting of Deforestation and Land Occupation. n.d. https://www.wri.org/research/geospatial-methods-corporate-ghg-accounting-deforestation-and-land-occupation.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Resources Institute |title=Geospatial Methods for Corporate GHG Accounting of Deforestation and Land Occupation |url=https://www.wri.org/research/geospatial-methods-corporate-ghg-accounting-deforestation-and-land-occupation |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldresourcesinstitutendgeospatial, author = {{World Resources Institute}}, title = {{Geospatial Methods for Corporate GHG Accounting of Deforestation and Land Occupation}}, institution = {World Resources Institute}, url = {https://www.wri.org/research/geospatial-methods-corporate-ghg-accounting-deforestation-and-land-occupation}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }