Over the last few months, the GHG Protocol has been planning new guidelines for product life-cycle emissions and corporate-level scope 3 emissions. The World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development are in the process of convening a global stakeholder process to develop these standards.

With “carbon footprint” increasingly becoming a popular buzzword within the corporate lexicon, companies are seeking more guidance on how to develop fuller and more accurate pictures of their greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in terms of supply chain, lifecycle, and product emissions. In recent months, many companies and stakeholders have been looking to the GHG Protocol to develop new guidelines on supply chain and lifecycle GHG accounting. In response to this demand, WRI and WBCSD designed a survey to assess the need for new guidelines and sent the survey to roughly 400 companies, experts, and other stakeholders.