Most companies I know calculate their greenhouse gas emissions using GHG Protocol standards. Most, but not all, because a significant number of companies use ISO 1406X standards. This is the situation in Poland, but in some European Union countries, ISO standards are more popular.
With two ways to calculate something, we cannot expect the results to be fully comparable. The GHG Protocol and ISO 1406X are similar, but there are many details in which they differ. The significance of these differences grows as companies, their business partners, and financial institutions strive to obtain increasingly accurate results in the coming years.
Why have the organizations behind the world's two most popular emission calculation standards only now decided to join forces and standardize their guidelines (more information on this topic can be found at GHG Protocol i ISO)? It is a fairly natural process that simply takes time. After all, the GHG Protocol published the first version of its standard in 2001, and the first edition of ISO 14064 was published in 2006. Both families of standards have been supplemented with sets of guidelines, and both have undergone periodic revisions. Above all, they have been used more and more frequently by companies. Without these changes and practical experience, it would not have been possible to draw conclusions that would allow for the harmonization of standards.
When a new area of issues requiring management emerges, the related phenomena must be quantified and counted in some way. In the case of the impact of businesses on climate change, greenhouse gas emissions were already an issue in the 1990s. Note that many other areas of concern are not yet at this stage of standardization. One of the first practical ideas for calculating how circular a company's operations are was the Circulytics metrics developed by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and published quite recently, in 2021. There are at least several other approaches to measuring circularity. When a problem arises, many organizations usually try to solve it. Over time, it becomes clear which methods are better, i.e., more precise and easier to apply.
Eventually, there comes a stage where business needs require full comparability, and that is when standardization is needed. Calculation standards (for emissions, circularity, impact on biodiversity, or anything else) are created by public-private organizations; they cannot be decreed at the level of a regulation, law, or international agreement. They must first prove their usefulness and only then are they incorporated, directly or indirectly, into legislation. In the European Union, when creating ESRS standards, we recognized the equivalence of both sets of standards for calculating emissions: GHG Protocol and ISO.
The work on harmonizing these two sets of standards will take several years. We do not yet know the exact schedule for this work. However, I believe that both organizations, concerned about the quality of the results, will not rush. Personally, I can only envy the teams involved in the work that they will not be under as much political pressure as the Sustainability Reporting TEG and Board at EFRAG.
Will we ever see a single set of standards for sustainability reporting? But really just one, the same one all over the world? Maybe. But I wouldn't count on it anytime soon. After all, financial reporting is much, much older, and we still don't have a single set of accounting standards, not only globally, but even within the European Union itself 😊
P.S. The day after tomorrow, on Wednesday, October 15, 2025, the Polish Association of Listed Companies is organizing webinar on the summary of sustainability reporting for 2024. I invite you to participate (free of charge for SEG member companies and subscribers). We will discuss what the reporting process looked like from the perspective of the company (Polenergia), what auditors think about the reports (Grant Thornton), and what data was disclosed in the reports (Notoria).
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