The GHG Protocol is revising its Scope 3 Standard for the first time since 2011. If you work in LCA, this probably deserves more of your attention than it's getting.
Draft standards are expected for public consultation soon, with final publication targeted for late 2027. Nothing is decided yet — but the Technical Working Group materials are public, and the direction is worth tracking.
The biggest shift: data quality transparency. The revisions would likely require companies to disaggregate their Scope 3 emissions by data type — separating supplier-specific data from spend-based proxy estimates. That doesn't ban spend-based methods. But it makes the quality of your inventory visible in a way it hasn't been before. When 80% of your Category 1 footprint comes from procurement spend multiplied by a generic emission factor, that number starts carrying a different weight once you have to label it as such.
A new Category 16 is proposed for "facilitated emissions" — activities a company enables but doesn't directly operate. Think insurance underwriting, licensing, platform business models. Most reporting would likely be optional, and it's partly a reclassification of activities that sat awkwardly in Category 15. Less "closing a loophole," more giving these emissions a proper framework for disclosure.
What this probably means for practitioners: increased demand for primary data skills, though the shape is uncertain. Some of that will flow toward product-level LCA work. But better emission factor databases, sector benchmarks, and digital data exchange tools could absorb a lot of it too. The bigger bottleneck might end up being supplier data infrastructure — getting primary energy and material flow data out of thousands of suppliers who've never collected it before.
Either way, the direction of travel favors people who understand how to produce and evaluate primary data over people who know how to multiply spend by an emission factor. That distinction is probably worth something.
TWG meeting materials are public on the GHG Protocol site if you want to follow along.
