The newly released Greenhouse Gas Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard (LSRS) establishes a critical framework for companies to account for land-based emissions and carbon removals, addressing long-standing gaps in corporate climate disclosure. However, the standard’s potential to drive genuine decarbonisation and accurately account for emissions and removals is compromised by two structural ambiguities. 

Companies that produce or source land-based products or undertake activities that enhance removals are merely encouraged, not obliged, to set targets in line with global climate goals and to track their performance over time. Excluding removals from the mandatory part of the standard weakens the framework. Without mandatory participation, companies can selectively opt out of reporting removals, creating loopholes that allow significant portions of removals to remain unaccounted for. 

Secondly, while the standard mandates the separation of targets for emissions and removals to ensure transparency, it includes provisions that could allow the Science-Based Target initiative’s (SBTi) Forest, Land and Agriculture Science-Based Target-Setting Guidance (FLAG Guidance), which permits aggregating these figures into a single “net” target to take precedence. This contradiction risks enabling companies to mask ongoing emissions behind, in the worst case, temporary carbon sequestration and storage, undermining the LSRS’s core intent. 

To fulfil its promise, the LSRS must explicitly assert its primacy over the FLAG Guidance regarding target separation, ensuring that climate commitments remain transparent, scientifically robust, and incapable of being diluted by aggregation.