A new report shared exclusively with Heatmap documents failures of transparency and governance at the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
It is something of a miracle that tens of thousands of companies around the world voluntarily report their greenhouse gas emissions each year. In 2025, more than 22,100 businesses, together worth more than half the global stock market, disclosed this data. Unfortunately, it’s an open secret that many of their calculations are far off the mark.
This is not exactly their fault. To aid in the tedious process of tallying up carbon and to encourage a basic level of uniformity in how it’s done, companies rely on standards created by a nonprofit called the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. The group’s central challenge is ensuring that its standards are both credible and feasible — two qualities often in tension in greenhouse gas accounting. The method that produces the most accurate emissions inventory may not always be feasible, while the method that’s easy to implement may produce wildly inaccurate results.
Critics have long faulted the Protocol for allowing companies to look far better on paper than they do to the atmosphere. In 2022, the group began in earnest to try and fix this, starting with an overhaul of its governance. It created a new Independent Standards Board that would oversee and approve updates to each of its accounting rules, and later convened a series of technical working groups to develop the substance of those updates. One such group was...
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