Scope 3 Category 15: investments

Published 23 September 2026

Scope 3 Category 15 covers the emissions of the organisations a company finances or invests in, attributed to the investor in proportion to its share of the financing. The GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard defines it as emissions associated with the reporting company's investments in the reporting year, not already included in Scope 1 or Scope 2. For a bank, an insurer or an asset manager it is normally the largest category in the inventory by a wide margin, because the emissions of everything they finance sit inside it.

What does Scope 3 Category 15 include?

Four kinds of financing, under the GHG Protocol. Equity investments: shares in companies the reporting company does not control and does not consolidate. Debt investments: corporate bonds and loans, where the use of proceeds is known or unknown. Project finance: debt or equity to a specific project such as a power plant or a building. Managed investments and client services: assets managed on behalf of clients, and services such as underwriting and advisory, which the standard treats as optional to report.

Each kind attributes a share of the investee's or borrower's emissions to the investor. The investee's own Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions are required in the calculation; its Scope 3 emissions are optional, and the standard recommends including them where they are significant. Category 15 is therefore built almost entirely out of other organisations' inventories, which is what separates it from every other Scope 3 category.

Who reports Category 15?

Financial institutions above all: banks, insurers, asset managers, asset owners and development finance institutions. Any corporate with an investment arm, a venture fund, a joint venture it does not consolidate or a significant treasury portfolio also reports it, and often finds it larger than expected. A manufacturer with a minority stake in a supplier reports that supplier's attributed emissions here rather than under Category 1, purchased goods and services, which covers what it buys from the same supplier. The same organisation can appear in both categories for one reporting company, under different attribution rules.

How does Category 15 relate to PCAF and financed emissions?

PCAF, the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials, publishes the method financial institutions use to calculate Category 15. Its Global GHG Accounting and Reporting Standard for the Financial Industry, Part A, sets out how to attribute emissions for each asset class: listed equity and corporate bonds, business loans and unlisted equity, project finance, commercial real estate, mortgages, motor vehicle loans and sovereign debt. Financial institutions usually call the result financed emissions; in GHG Protocol terms it is their Category 15.

PCAF also publishes the data quality hierarchy that every Category 15 figure carries, from score 1, a reported and verified emissions figure from the counterparty, to score 5, an estimate from a sector or asset class average. That hierarchy is what makes Category 15 unusual: the standard requires the reporting institution to say, for its portfolio, how much of the total rests on counterparties' own figures and how much on averages.

How is Category 15 measured?

By attribution. For each investment, the investee's emissions are multiplied by an attribution factor: for a listed company the investor's outstanding amount divided by the company's enterprise value including cash; for a private company the outstanding amount divided by total equity plus debt; for a project, the investor's share of project financing. The GHG Protocol offers two routes to the investee's emissions. The investment-specific method uses the investee's own reported Scope 1 and 2 figures, collected from the investee or found in its disclosures. The average data method uses an emissions intensity for the investee's sector multiplied by its revenue, where no company-specific figure is available.

The two routes produce very different figures with identical arithmetic. A company-specific (primary) figure moves when the investee acts and can be traced to the investee's own report. A sector-average figure is the same for every company in the sector and moves only when the investor's exposure or the sector factor changes. Under PCAF the first is data quality score 1 or 2, the second score 4 or 5.

Why is Category 15 the largest category for financial institutions?

Because a financial institution's own operations are small and the operations it finances are not. A bank's Scope 1 and 2 are its buildings, vehicles and purchased energy. Its Category 15 is its attributed share of every borrower's and investee's operations, which is a slice of the real economy. The result is a category that dwarfs the rest of the inventory, and one where the quality of the total is set by counterparties the institution does not control and often cannot see: private companies, SMEs and subsidiaries that never published a figure to the market.

Where does the data for Category 15 come from?

From the counterparties, one way or another. Listed counterparties nearly all publish an inventory, so their figures arrive at the top of the hierarchy. Private counterparties are the difficulty. Many have published something, in an annual report, a national filing, a sustainability statement or a response to a customer's Scope 3 programme, but the figure has not reached the investor. The rest have not published, and sit on a sector average.

DitchCarbon holds verified emissions data for over 2 million organisations, built on primary emissions data wherever it exists, private companies included, matched to counterparties through entity resolution against DUNS, LEI and ISIN identifiers. Each organisation records which method produced its figure, with industry data fourth of four, and every figure carries its source and change history, so the share of a Category 15 total resting on a sector average is a number on screen and each reported line links to the document it came from. The counterparty emissions page describes how that fits inside a PCAF model an institution already runs.

If you are the investee or borrower

Your lenders and investors are reporting your emissions inside their Category 15 whether or not you have sent them a figure. If you have published an inventory, claiming your DitchCarbon profile puts it in front of every one of them at once, with the source, and lets you answer their questions once rather than per institution. If you have not, the figure they are using is your sector's average with your revenue attached, and a Scope 1 and 2 inventory built from your own energy and fuel data replaces it.

Related terms

Scope 3 Category 1, purchased goods and services. PCAF data quality score. Attribution factor. Weighted average carbon intensity (WACI). Financed emissions. Facilitated emissions (PCAF Part B). Insurance-associated emissions (PCAF Part C).