The agriculture, forestry, and other land use (AFOLU) sector contributes approximately 21 percent (11.9 ± 4.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year [Gt CO₂e yr⁻¹]) of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally, with land use change (LUC) responsible for about half of this total. Expansion of agricultural commodities into nonagricultural lands is a primary driver of LUC. For many consumer goods companies, these emissions dominate their scope 3 GHG inventories. Although the GHG Protocol’s 2022 draft Land Sector and Removals Guidance (LSRG) provides high-level requirements and guidance for reporting GHG emissions, the inherent complexity of the AFOLU sector and the LSRG’s built-in flexibility in methods and data sources can lead to inconsistent reporting outcomes, even among companies sourcing similar commodities from shared supply chains.

To improve consistency, World Resources Institute and Quantis, alongside Mérieux NutriSciences | Blonk, HowGood, and other expert collaborators, developed benchmark jurisdiction-level LUC and land occupation (LO) factors to operationalize key LSRG components. These metrics draw on open, globally consistent geospatial datasets for 42 major crops and crop categories across multiple supply chain traceability levels (global, national, provincial, and municipal). The factors include emissions from conversion of forested land (defined as woody vegetation more than five meters tall and with greater than 10 percent canopy cover in 2000), associated soil carbon losses, and yield factors (i.e., inverse of yield used for land occupation). Coverage spans the reporting years 2020–24 and will include updates as new data become available. LUC emission factors are reported for carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, both separately and in aggregate.

Results highlight substantial variation in deforestation-related LUC emission factors and yield factors across crops and traceability levels. For 2024, national-level averages show soy emissions of 1.67 tonnes of CO₂e per tonne of crop in Brazil, 0.40 in the United States, and 0.59 in Argentina; cocoa emissions of 24.46 in Côte d’Ivoire, 6.7 in Ghana, and 27.08 in Indonesia; and oil palm emissions of 0.98 in Indonesia, 0.71 in Malaysia, and 0.42 in Thailand. However, subnational analyses reveal emission “hotspots” masked by national averages, highlighting the importance of finer-scale traceability.

This geospatially explicit, standardized approach improves comparability, transparency, and scientific rigor in corporate GHG inventories. By promoting standardized methods, this technical note aims to harmonize GHG reporting across the industry and support credible supply chain emissions tracking.

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