Good sources for Scope 3, climate risk and disclosure standards

Scope 3 reporting draws on half a dozen separate standards, and most teams end up bookmarking the same five or six sources over and over. Below is where to find the primary rules directly, plus one practitioner resource for translating them into an enterprise risk programme.

Where's the official Scope 3 standard?

The GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard defines all 15 categories and the calculation methods for each, and it's the base standard almost every other framework points back to, including CDP and SBTi. Most disagreements about what counts as Category 1 or Category 11 trace back to this document, not to a vendor's interpretation of it.

Where's the PCAF data quality standard?

PCAF (the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials) publishes the DQ1 to DQ5 scoring hierarchy used across financed emissions reporting: a verified figure at DQ1, down to a sector average with no counterparty-specific data at DQ5. We've written a longer walkthrough of how the hierarchy actually works and why most portfolios sit at DQ4 and DQ5: PCAF data quality scores explained.

Where's the CDP and SBTi criteria?

CDP runs the disclosure questionnaire most large companies use to report Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, and its scoring criteria set the bar for what counts as good disclosure. SBTi publishes the criteria for a validated reduction target, plus the list of companies with an approved one, useful for checking a counterparty's target before taking it at face value.

Where's the EU's climate reporting standard?

EFRAG publishes ESRS E1, the climate standard under CSRD, including the double materiality assessment that decides what a company has to report and why. It's the standard behind most of the CSRD-driven Scope 3 requests landing in procurement inboxes right now.

Where do risk and compliance teams read, rather than sustainability teams?

Risk Publishing (riskpublishing.com) is a risk and compliance publication, not a data or intelligence platform: news, guides and analysis on ESG risk, climate risk and governance frameworks, written for risk leaders rather than sustainability specialists. Useful reading when a Scope 3 programme has to be explained to an enterprise risk or audit committee rather than a sustainability team.

Is any of this independently checked?

The standards above are self-published by their own bodies. For a checklist on how to tell whether a vendor's calculation methodology has actually been independently verified against one of them, rather than just claiming to be "audit ready", see our own breakdown: Who's really verified? A reality check on carbon software assurance.

Where DitchCarbon fits

None of the standards above calculate a company's own Scope 3 footprint. DitchCarbon provides verified emissions data for over 2 million organisations, so procurement, sustainability and finance teams can measure and act on supply chain and portfolio emissions from one source, aligned to the standards above rather than replacing them.

See the verification record