January 30, 2026, marked a long-awaited milestone for those following climate action across food and other agricultural systems (e.g., cotton, wool)—the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHGP) Land Sector and Removals Standard (LSRS) was finalized after more than three years of multi-stakeholder engagement, feedback, and debate on the 2022 draft guidance. This final draft outlines the requirements for accounting and reporting land-sector GHG emissions and removals, in line with the Protocol. Here are some highlights of where the Standard landed, along with our take on what it could mean for your company.
LSRS Highlights
To keep you up to date, the Pure Strategies team has compiled a few (non-exhaustive) takeaways to help you understand this Standard.
- LSRS now explicitly applies to companies with “significant” land-sector activities in their operations or value chains. Though “significant” is not qualified, GHGP cites existing definitions, such as the 20% of total emissions threshold used by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).
- Forest carbon accounting and reporting requirements are noticeably absent from LSRS. Until GHGP publishes requirements in future Standard updates, companies reporting on forestry emissions and removals should be transparent in their accounting methodology.
- The Standard officially takes effect on January 1, 2027, giving companies until then to adopt the LSR Standard.
- Physical traceability is required when using a spatial boundary for a sourcing area more granular than a given jurisdiction (e.g., country), such as a sourcing region, land management unit (e.g., farm or field), or harvested area. Practically, this means that if you want to account for emissions reductions from a sourced commodity (i.e., use an emission factor for a specific sourcing region or a more granular location), you will need to demonstrate that you physically sourced the commodity from that location, as proven by a chain of custody (CoC) model. Identity preservation, segregation, controlled blending, and now, mass balance approaches with certain controls are CoC models approved by GHGP to demonstrate physical traceability. Demonstrating physical traceability using an approved CoC model can be achieved through certification programs or audited internal systems. Questions still remain on what constitutes an acceptable traceability system.
- Proximate and adjacent non-productive lands (riparian buffers, windbreaks, conservation set-asides) can be included in your emissions and removals calculations if you have physical traceability to at least the farm or field. This means that nearby land used for conservation purposes, such as storing carbon and enhancing biodiversity, can be included in your GHG inventory even if you are not sourcing directly from those fields. However, if the lands are forested, there is no clear guidance on how to account for emissions and removals, so the burden is on companies to transparently document their accounting methodology.
- Reporting GHG removals from your operations and value chain is not required, but if you elect to report them in your inventory, certain conditions must be met, including:
- Report removals separately from emissions by scope (1 or 3) and storage type (land-based or geologic)
- Report on the full life cycle emissions associated with the removal (e.g., energy use, inputs, processing)
- Achieve physical traceability throughout the full CO2 removals and storage pathway, including to the sink (e.g., photosynthesis, direct air capture), carbon pools (e.g., soil, geologic/rock deposits), and other potential intermediate processes
- Ensure permanence by maintaining ongoing carbon storage monitoring, and if lost, reporting removals as net CO2 emissions (removals lost but carbon pools still within the inventory boundary) or reversals (carbon pools no longer in the inventory boundary and monitoring is lost)
- Quantify uncertainty and ensure reported removal values are conservative
- Product carbon storage is optional for reporting and is now its own category, which must be reported separately from the physical GHG inventory.
- Companies are now required to account for land occupation, which quantifies the area of land (in hectares) used for agricultural production. This is a helpful metric for tracking agricultural intensification and broader impacts on nature.
- Companies are now required to account for land carbon leakage (in CO2e) if they engage in activities that create a high risk of displacing food or feed production, leading to agricultural expansion and land-use change driven by demand for other agricultural products.
More to come
Currently, the LSRS covers only agricultural emissions and removals, and not those from forestry practices. Immediate plans for when the Standard will be updated to include forested lands remain unclear, despite the urgent need to develop credible, science-based accounting methods for this sector. Supplemental guidance on agricultural emissions, however, is scheduled to be released in Q2 of 2026, including more detailed calculation guidance and case studies on implementing the Standard.
Progress on abatement over perfection in accounting
Despite the absence of detailed forest sector guidance, the Land Sector and Removals Standard is significant because it reflects an industry-wide effort to directly influence how progress toward net-zero is tracked and thus, achieved. What it does not do is define for the first time what is required to mitigate agricultural GHG emissions. We know what that takes:
- Eliminating land conversion and deforestation
- Optimizing nutrient management and reducing fossil-based inputs
- Integrating enteric emissions-reducing feed additives into ruminant diets
- Improving manure management
- Implementing regenerative agricultural practices such as cover cropping, conservation tillage, and effective crop rotation
- Electrifying farm equipment and raw ingredient processing
- Reducing food and other agricultural material waste across the entire value chain
- Shifting to more sustainable diets
- Increasing recycled content in apparel, footwear, accessories, home furnishings, and packaging
- Designing textiles and other products for circularity to simplify recycling and reduce virgin agricultural inputs
What is less clear, and what varies from company to company across different nodes of the supply chain, is how to gain buy-in to help support this work, operationalize these levers within your value chain, and, importantly, finance these projects.
We also know that progress is paramount. Before accounting perfection, the ability to act on your inventory should come first. We understand that there are conflicting dynamics between LSRS accounting requirements and today’s business realities, including challenges in establishing physical traceability for commodities across dynamic supply chains and ensuring carbon removals can be monitored and remain permanent in perpetuity. Your company’s decision to align with the Standard or not depends on your business’s needs, leadership priorities, stakeholder expectations, and many other considerations. What is critical is to begin acting if you have not yet, or to continue if you have already begun your journey. We can help support you at any stage of the journey.
