The GHG Protocol published the Land Sector and Removals (LSR) Standard in January 2026. It applies from 1 January 2027, typically covering the 2026 reporting year.
It applies to companies with significant land sector activities anywhere in the value chain, including CPG brands and grocery retailers that purchase, process or sell agricultural products.
Inventories keep their Scope 1, 2 and 3 structure, and gain four land emissions subcategories, optional carbon removals reported separately, and new metrics such as land occupation and land carbon leakage.
Traceability determines how you account: better supply chain visibility earns more accurate numbers and unlocks removals claims.
If agriculture sits anywhere in your supply chain, the rules for counting its emissions have changed. In January 2026 the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol) published the Land Sector and Removals Standard, the LSR Standard for short. It is the first global standard for how companies account for greenhouse gas emissions and carbon dioxide removals from agriculture, and it applies from 1 January 2027. A clarifying update (version 1.1) and a 518-page implementation guidance followed in June 2026, so the full rulebook is now in print.
This article is an introduction and orientation. It explains what the LSR Standard is, who it applies to, and what changes when you move from a familiar Scope 1, 2 and 3 inventory to one that follows the new rules. It assumes you already know that land emissions are a significant share of your footprint, and very little else.
The LSR Standard is a supplement to the two documents most sustainability teams already work with: the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard and the Scope 3 Standard. Your inventory still rests on those foundations. The LSR Standard adds 32 requirements that tell you how to count what they never fully covered: emissions from deforestation, farming and land management, and, for the first time in any GHG Protocol standard, carbon removals. It supersedes the GHG Protocol's earlier Agricultural Guidance.
The gap it closes is large. The land sector produces approximately 22% of global net greenhouse gas emissions, yet these emissions were previously underreported or left out of corporate inventories because no standard said how to count them.
Version 1 covers agriculture and CO₂ removal technologies. Forestry is deferred: the GHG Protocol's board could not yet agree on forest carbon accounting methods, and has announced a request for information in 2026 to shape a future version. Companies with forest exposure should watch that process closely.
The LSR Standard applies to any company reporting a GHG Protocol inventory that has significant land sector activities in its operations or value chain. That includes companies that own or manage farmland, and, crucially for CPG brands and grocery retailers, companies that purchase, process or sell significant volumes of food, feed, fibre or bioenergy products. It also applies to any company that chooses to report CO₂ removals.
There is no numerical threshold. Significance is judged relative to your total inventory. For a food and beverage company, a CPG brand or a grocery retailer, where agricultural commodities dominate Scope 3, the practical answer is yes, it applies.
The scopes survive. Everything you report under the LSR Standard is still organised into Scope 1, 2 and 3. What changes is what you count, how finely you report it, and which new metrics sit alongside the familiar tonnes of CO₂e.
Today, most inventories report a single emissions figure per scope. Under the LSR Standard, land emissions are reported separately from fossil fuel and industrial emissions, and are broken into four subcategories:
Reporting removals is optional. If you choose to report them, they appear separately from emissions, never netted off by default, and they come with conditions. The Standard recognises two types: land management removals, such as carbon stored in soils and trees through agroforestry or cover cropping, and technological removals with geologic storage, such as direct air capture.
The conditions are the substance. To report a removal you need traceability to the land or facility where the carbon is stored, primary data of sufficient quality, allocation rules that prevent two companies claiming the same tonne, and ongoing monitoring to show the carbon stays put. If stored carbon is lost and monitoring cannot continue, you report a reversal. Suppliers, third parties or supply chain programmes can run the monitoring on your behalf, and a reserve of unclaimed removals can buffer the risk of losses.
Two additions sit outside the emissions totals. Companies with land sector activities report their agricultural land occupation in hectares, a measure of how much of the world's finite productive land your business draws on. And companies whose actions carry a high risk of displacing food production, for example diverting food crops into bioenergy, must account for land carbon leakage: the land conversion their choices trigger beyond their own value chain.
The Standard meets companies where their supply chain visibility is. Know only the country of origin, and you account with statistical averages for that jurisdiction. Trace to the first collection point, a grain silo or a mill, and you can use averages for that sourcing region. Trace to the farm, using recognised chain of custody models, and you can use data specific to those fields.
The incentive runs one way: better traceability generally means more accurate numbers, and it is the gateway to claiming removals and farm-level improvements in Scope 3. Suppliers who invest in visibility will have numbers their buyers can use; those who do not will be represented by averages.
Land use change emissions are spread over a 20-year assessment period using linear amortisation, weighted towards recent events. Forest cleared in your supply shed last year adds far more to this year's inventory than forest cleared 15 years ago, and a conversion event keeps contributing, at a declining rate, for two decades. Sourcing from recently deforested land now carries a long accounting tail, which strengthens the business case for deforestation-free supply chains well beyond reputational risk.
The Standard requires each category and subcategory to be reported separately, by scope and by Scope 3 category, with emissions and removals shown apart. You may publish an aggregate or net figure in addition, and if you do, it must include leakage and be labelled as a separate total. A single blended number that quietly nets removals against emissions is no longer conformant reporting.
The Standard applies from 1 January 2027. For companies that report in conformance with the GHG Protocol from that date, this typically means the 2026 reporting year, so the data groundwork has to come before the effective date.
In practice (and this is our reading of where things go, rather than a requirement in the text), expect three shifts. Procurement data will need to answer new questions: which commodities, what volumes, from which countries at a minimum. Supplier contracts will increasingly carry data-sharing clauses, which the Standard itself points to as a way to keep removal monitoring alive across changing supplier relationships. And the programmes your disclosures feed, CDP and the Science Based Targets initiative's Forest, Land and Agriculture (FLAG) pathway among them, are expected to build their own rules on top of the LSR Standard, since the GHG Protocol developed it in close contact with both.
Three moves cover the first six months. Map your land exposure: list the agricultural commodities you buy or sell, their volumes and countries of origin, and estimate which dominate your land footprint. Assess your data against the traceability ladder: for your top commodities, establish how far towards the farm you can currently see, and where averages will have to stand in. Then decide your removals ambition early, because claiming removals demands traceability and monitoring that take time to build, and an inventory that reports zero removals is fully conformant.
Terrascope was built for exactly this terrain. The platform measures Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions for land-heavy supply chains, carries a dedicated, productised SBTi FLAG module, and supports GHG Protocol LSR reporting, grounded in deep food and agriculture expertise across 50+ countries. If land emissions are the biggest and least understood part of your footprint, talk to our team about what to do next.