Corporate Greenhouse Gas Inventories for the Agricultural Sector

The document assesses the application of the GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard to the agricultural sector, identifying that while mechanical emissions are easy to track, non-mechanical sources like soils and livestock present significant accounting challenges due to variability and long timescales.

• The GHG Protocol Corporate Standard's generic accounting procedures can be applied directly to common agricultural structures, including commodity production contracts, leasing arrangements, and co-operatives.
• Accounting for emissions from livestock and soils is more difficult than accounting for machinery due to the reversibility of carbon stocks, long timescales for carbon stock changes, the difficulty of separating natural factors from management practices, and variability in emission rates across space and time.
• Proposed best practices for addressing agricultural accounting challenges include reporting mechanical and non-mechanical sources separately, using both CO2 fluxes and stock size for carbon stock information, allocating long-term carbon stock changes evenly across reporting periods, using a time threshold for historical land management changes, and reporting land use change emissions under an appropriate scope rather than as a memo item.

APA

World Resources Institute (n.d.). Corporate Greenhouse Gas Inventories for the Agricultural Sector. https://www.wri.org/research/corporate-greenhouse-gas-inventories-agricultural-sector

Chicago

World Resources Institute. Corporate Greenhouse Gas Inventories for the Agricultural Sector. n.d. https://www.wri.org/research/corporate-greenhouse-gas-inventories-agricultural-sector.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Resources Institute |title=Corporate Greenhouse Gas Inventories for the Agricultural Sector |url=https://www.wri.org/research/corporate-greenhouse-gas-inventories-agricultural-sector |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldresourcesinstitutendcorporate, author = {{World Resources Institute}}, title = {{Corporate Greenhouse Gas Inventories for the Agricultural Sector}}, institution = {World Resources Institute}, url = {https://www.wri.org/research/corporate-greenhouse-gas-inventories-agricultural-sector}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }