Scaling Scope 3 Interventions for Climate and Nature: What Companies Need to Know Now
Preview
Introduction
Implementation of Scope 3 interventions, or activities reducing or removing emissions within a company’s value chain, is entering a new phase. 2026 marks a pivotal year for Scope 3 interventions, with major updates to leading climate standards and guidance (including new rules within SBTi’s V2 standard), alongside an expanding ecosystem of frameworks, initiatives, and regulations. Evolving approaches to accounting, quantification, and value chain collaboration are unlocking opportunities for companies to scale emissions reductions and removals across their supply chains.
Scope 3 interventions are becoming an increasingly important way to accelerate progress toward climate targets, particularly where companies have limited direct control over emissions but significant influence through sourcing, procurement, and customer relationships. However, expectations on quality, traceability, and claims from regulators, investors, and civil society organizations are rising. Companies now need to navigate how to scale credible, measurable action across their value chains, not just decide whether to act.
What initiatives are shaping the Scope 3 interventions landscape?
A wide ecosystem of initiatives now support Scope 3 interventions, each playing a distinct role:
- Accounting and disclosure frameworks, such as the GHG Protocol (with its recent land and removals guidance, LSRG), AIM Platform, and TCAT, define how companies can communicate progress and impact.
- Intervention and certification frameworks, such as Gold Standard, SustainCERT, Verra S3S, and AIM Platform, enable companies to design, quantify, and verify value-chain interventions.
- Policy and regulatory frameworks, such as the EU’s CRCF and Article 6, shape the quality, integrity, and availability of mitigation outcomes. The CRCF is expected to influence the quality and supply of carbon removals in Europe, while Article 6 establishes rules for international accounting of emissions reductions and removals.
- Target-setting frameworks, such as SBTi (and the now released draft ISO Net Zero standard), define how to credibly account for reductions and removals in setting and implementing targets.
Together, these initiatives are creating clearer rules for how companies can design, scale, and report Scope 3 interventions. For a complete look at the landscape of initiatives now supporting Scope 3 interventions, access BSR’s guide.
What are the latest trends in Scope 3 interventions?
Several clear trends are emerging:
- Certified Scope 3 interventions are gaining traction and are now clearly separated from carbon credits and removals. Traditional carbon credits and removals have a clear, defined role outside a company’s value chain—SBTi’s V2 Ongoing Emissions Responsibility (OER) approach has helped crystallize that. Scope 3 interventions are scaling in parallel, with a growing role and distinctive mechanisms.
- Physical traceability is becoming the anchor of credibility. GHG Protocol and SBTi guidance increasingly require linkage of companies’ Scope 3 interventions to their supply chains, while offering established concepts such as “supply sheds” as a way around the real challenge of full traceability across supply chains.
- Co-claiming (multiple actors reporting or communicating benefits associated with the same intervention) and co-investment (multiple value-chain actors sharing the cost of interventions) are normalizing. Companies, farmers, and downstream actors are increasingly expected and are able to share responsibility and benefits across value chains.
- Contribution approaches (focusing on financing mitigation beyond a company’s direct inventory reductions and advancing global climate goals) are replacing neutrality claims. Carbon credits are not going away, but their use is shifting and clarifying from supporting carbon neutrality claims to enabling contribution-based approaches (e.g., in line with SBTi’s latest suggestion of Ongoing Emission Responsibility and frameworks that expand impact statements).
- The quality bar for landscape interventions is rising. In agriculture, frameworks such as the EU’s CRCF are raising expectations around permanence, leakage, and monitoring of carbon removals on land systems. The social and environmental integrity of climate and nature solutions, whether within or outside the value chain, is under increased scrutiny.
- Multiple pathways for measuring Scope 3 interventions are emerging. Physical accounting, unit-based approaches, and reporting frameworks coexist, with varying levels of maturity and acceptance. This provides companies at all levels of maturity an opportunity to measurably act on Scope 3, including those with limited resources or at the beginning stage of engaging with their supply chain.
While convergence is increasing, the landscape is complex due to the plethora of initiatives with different levels of alignment.
What do changes in Scope 3 interventions mean for companies?
These shifts fundamentally change how companies can act on Scope 3 emissions through certified interventions.
First, the opportunity to reduce emissions at scale is growing. Scope 3 interventions offer one of the few scalable pathways for companies to influence emissions that occur outside their direct operational control. New tools and frameworks enable companies to scale interventions across supply chains, including through partnerships with farmers and customers. For example, for food and agriculture businesses, this creates a pathway to address emissions at scale. The GHG Protocol’s LSRG introduction of a “removal” accounting category allows companies to focus on reductions while also engaging on removals, which further reduces their impacts. This supports companies in achieving Scope 3 targets while simultaneously creating more resilient and regenerative sourcing landscapes.
Second, accounting guidance, environmental claims requirements, and regulations are tightening. Scrutiny from regulators, investors, NGOs, and customers is increasing. Claims of emissions reduction and carbon removal must be defensible, and poorly structured approaches carry reputational risk.
Third, the system is still evolving. Different futures are possible, from business convergence around physical accounting to fragmented landscapes with competing approaches. The choices companies make today will influence which direction the market takes, underscoring the importance of collaboration and alignment in the business community to promote consistency and interoperability.
What actions can companies take to advance Scope 3 strategies?
Despite evolving guidelines, companies have a clear "no-regret" path forward. Success will depend on working collaboratively across the value chain to identify and implement the right interventions in the right places. These interventions should be grounded in science, aligned with business priorities, and supported by sufficient resources. As companies advance their Scope 3 strategies, five priorities stand out:
1. Scale physically linked value chain interventions: Prioritize actions within sourcing regions and supply sheds that are within your supply chain, even when traceability is not yet perfect. This remains the most credible, widely supported, and lowest-risk approach for driving measurable impact.
2. Anchor in robust accounting: Align with GHG Protocol guidance (including land and removals) to ensure emissions and removals are measured consistently and conservatively.
3. Separate inventory and contribution: Clearly separate Scope 3 inventory reductions, value chain interventions, and climate contributions beyond the value chain. Transparent accounting and communication will help maintain credibility and avoid overstated claims.
4. Build partnerships across the value chain: Scaling impact requires collaboration. Co-investment with farmers, suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders can unlock the resources, incentives, and capabilities needed to accelerate implementation.
5. Prioritize quality and credibility: Focus on high-quality interventions, aligned with emerging supply-focused standards such as CRCF, with strong safeguards on permanence and traceability.
What can companies expect next on Scope 3 interventions?
- GHG Protocol sets the foundation for accounting and reporting: As guidance evolves, GHG Protocol is expected to continue serving as the primary framework for accounting land-sector emissions, removals, and Scope 3 impacts, providing the basis for credible measurement and disclosure.
- SBTi’s Corporate Net Zero Standard V2 clarifies its approach to Scope 3 interventions, allowing market instruments to be leveraged to advance in-value-chain decarbonization through Scope 3 interventions. This update includes a hierarchy of three categories of action, all of which include market instruments as an acceptable option as part of a balanced strategy.
- Continued shift away from ‘offsetting’ as a practice: Companies are increasingly focusing on reducing emissions and scaling removals within their value chains, while using carbon credits separately to support broader climate goals beyond their inventories, such as in SBTi’s new OER framework. However, companies cannot apply credits for Scope 3 emissions reductions.
- Increasing normalization of co-claiming across value chain tiers: As multiple actors invest in the same interventions, co-claiming approaches, supported by transparent, layered reporting, are likely to become more common across value chain tiers.
- Regulation will play a growing role in defining quality and credibility: Emerging policy frameworks, particularly in Europe, are expected to shape expectations around the integrity, accounting, and use of removals and other climate interventions within value chains.
- Companies will continue to test different implementation models: While many organizations are prioritizing physically linked interventions and accounting approaches, others are exploring unit-based systems and alternative mechanisms for allocating impacts. The practices adopted by early movers will help shape emerging norms for measuring, reporting, and communicating Scope 3 progress.
As scrutiny of Scope 3 emissions intensifies, leading companies will need to move beyond measuring emissions to determining how best to increase reductions and removals across their value chains. BSR supports members at every stage of the journey, from assessing value chain impacts to designing and implementing interventions that support long-term climate, nature, and social objectives. Through this integrated approach, companies can strengthen resilience, address interconnected climate and nature risks, and create economic and environmental value across their value chains.