The silent revolution of carbon footprints: How the new Land Sector and Removal Standard (LSR) will herald a new era of climate management
With the Land Sector and Removals Standard (LSR), the Greenhouse Gas Protocol has developed the world's most comprehensive framework for accounting for land use, land use change, and biogenic and technological carbon removals. Today, LSR is a seemingly niche topic that is largely underestimated. However, the new standard will affect many companies and bring with it new opportunities and challenges.
Almost every carbon footprint for companies is now calculated according to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Sustainability managers should therefore familiarise themselves with the new developments. The new standard will complement the Corporate Standard and Scope 3 standards in the future and address key gaps in previous greenhouse gas reporting. The LSR standard thus creates, for the first time, a globally consistent framework for how companies should account for the following:
- Emissions from land use changes (e.g. deforestation)
- Emissions from land management
- Biogenic carbon flows
- CO₂ storage in natural and technological sinks
Increased requirements for company balance sheets
The requirements for data quality, methodology and transparency are increasing significantly, and with them the corresponding costs. The aim is for companies to understand how their activities affect the amount of carbon in biomass, soils or biogenic products and how these stores change over time. The new standard adds a total of 23 additional, potentially relevant balance sheet categories that companies will have to systematically take into account in future. This will require increasingly geo-specific, supply chain-specific and empirically reliable data. This will significantly increase the demands on monitoring infrastructures, the involvement of suppliers and internal data governance. As a result, accounting will become both more granular and more demanding.
Making CO₂ removal visible
The new requirements for CO₂ removals are particularly far-reaching. For the first time, these can be taken into account in a carbon footprint. The standard establishes strict rules on the permanence of sinks, focusing on monitoring, traceability and the accounting of potential reversals (cancellations of CO₂ removals). Any company that reports CO₂ removals, whether biogenic or technologically generated, must in future ensure that the stored quantities are monitored throughout their entire life cycle and that any losses are immediately taken into account in the balance sheet. Traceability along the entire removal path, from the sink to storage and potential intermediate stages, is mandatory. The GHG Protocol thus creates a basis on which only removals that are demonstrably permanent and verifiable can be credited. This can have a significant impact on net-zero strategies.
Clear definitions for land emissions
The standard introduces a clear distinction between emissions from land use change and those from land management. Emissions from deforestation and land conversion must be accounted for in future. The same applies to emissions resulting from land management. The standard specifies different methodologies for this. While land use changes must be accounted for over a standardised period of at least twenty years, land management focuses on the annual net changes in carbon stocks.
Who is affected?
This particularly affects companies in agriculture, food and forestry, the wood and paper industry, the bioenergy sector and the construction industry, insofar as biogenic materials are used. Industries with large land-based supply chains, such as textile or cosmetics companies, also fall within the scope of application, as do companies that use or provide CO₂ storage solutions.
For affected companies, this new set of rules is both a challenge and an opportunity, as transparent and credible handling of land emissions and CO₂ storage will form a central basis for corporate balance sheets, regulatory compliance, ESG reporting and strategic climate management in the future. Other standards and awards such as SBTi (currently via its Forest, Land and Agriculture Guidance (FLAG)) will also adopt the new Greenhouse Gas Protocol requirements. It is therefore worthwhile to familiarise yourself with the regulations at an early stage.
From regulation to strategic opportunity
The Land Sector and Removals Standard will make land emissions and CO₂ removals an integral part of Scope 3 balances. Companies that prepare early will create transparency, credibility and room for manoeuvre.
30-minute webinar on March 10, 2026
Our Senior Consultant Noémie Bommer will explain how the new Land Sector and Removals Standard will change Scope 3 accounting, who will be affected, and how you can prepare.
Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash Back to overview
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