The GHG Protocol’s Land Sector & Removals Standard (LSRS) is live. If your company reports carbon removals from agricultural value chains, the rules just changed. Here’s what the final Standard says about traceability, data quality, and the five gates standing between you and a credible removals claim.
In January 2026, the GHG Protocol published the final Land Sector and Removals Standard (LSRS) — replacing the 2022 pilot draft that left many open questions. It is the new normative rulebook for how companies in the food and beverage value chain account for land-based emissions and removals.
Where the draft offered narrative guidance, the final Standard introduces 32 numbered “shall” requirements. Among the areas that got significantly tighter: the conditions under which companies can report carbon removals from their agricultural supply chains.
For food retailers, brands, and producers who have built sustainability narratives around regenerative agriculture, soil carbon, or “low-carbon” product claims, this is a pivotal moment. Removals are no longer a nice-to-have flourish in a sustainability report — they’re now governed by hard gates that determine whether a claim can stand up to assurance.
Let’s break down what the Standard actually says.
Removals are optional — but if you report them, the rules are mandatory
The LSRS does not require companies to report removals. You can build a fully compliant GHG inventory without them. But if you choose to report removals — for example, because you want to substantiate claims about carbon sequestration in your supply chain — the final Standard elevates every criterion to a numbered requirement. Miss one, and the removal cannot be claimed.
This is a meaningful shift from the 2022 draft, where removals criteria were presented as guidance. Under the final Standard, they carry the same normative weight as emissions accounting requirements.
The five hard gates for removals
Requirements 19 through 23 of the LSRS set out five conditions that must all be met before a company can include land management CO₂ removals in its GHG inventory. Think of them as gates: pass all five or report zero removals.
1. Stock-change monitoring (Requirement 19)
Removals may only be accounted for based on annual or annualised carbon stock increases. The final Standard explicitly removes dynamic and tonne-year discounting methods from in-scope reporting. If your carbon stocks went up this year, you can account for that increase — but you cannot discount future permanence into a present-day credit.
2. Traceability (Requirement 20)
Companies must establish physical traceability throughout the full CO₂ removals pathway. The minimum bar is traceability to a sourcing region — a spatially explicit land area that supplies raw material to a first point of aggregation or processing facility. Jurisdiction-level traceability (country or sub-national region) is not sufficient for removals claims.
This is worth pausing on, because it has significant implications for what kind of removals you can claim at each traceability level. We’ll come back to this below.
3. Data quality (Requirement 21)
Carbon stock changes must be accounted for using empirical data specific to the land carbon pools where the carbon is stored. Statistical significance is required. Conservative values must be applied. Secondary data is only permitted where it is demonstrably representative of the specific production system.
In practice, this means industry-average sequestration factors or generic literature values will not qualify. You need primary data from the land where the carbon is actually being stored.
4. Allocation and double counting (Requirement 22)
The same allocation methods that apply to emissions must also apply to removals. Allocated removals from a given land management unit or sourcing region cannot exceed 100% of the removals occurring there. And crucially, the same tonne of removal cannot be claimed by multiple companies at the same tier of the value chain.
5. Permanence and reversals (Requirement 23)
Companies must maintain an ongoing monitoring plan with a maximum five-year refresh cycle. If monitoring is lost, previously reported removals must be assumed emitted. If a reversal occurs (carbon is released back to the atmosphere), it must be reported as emissions or reversals in the period it happens. There is no grace period.
So what kind of removals can actually be claimed?
The removals the LSRS governs are specifically land management CO₂ removals — meaning net carbon stock increases on productive agricultural lands. In practical terms, this covers:
- Soil carbon sequestration from improved practices like reduced tillage, cover cropping, or organic amendments
- Biomass accumulation in agroforestry systems, perennial crops, or managed hedgerows
- Below-ground carbon stock increases in root systems on managed agricultural land
This is not about avoided deforestation (which falls under a separate accounting category: land use change emissions). And it is not about emission reductions from improved farm efficiency. Removals, under the LSRS, means actual measured increases in carbon stocks on the land that produced the sourced product.
Traceability determines what you can claim
The LSRS formalises four levels of traceability (Chapter 5, Table 5.1), and your level determines the ceiling on your removals claims:
- Land Management Unit (LMU) or harvested area: Full removals claims permitted. This is the gold standard — you know the specific farm or field where the carbon was stored, and you have direct measurement data.
- Sourcing region: Land management CO₂ removals can be reported, but with a heavy set of safeguards (Requirement 20.1). These include: using the same spatial boundary for emissions and removals, representative sampling across all productive lands in the region, conservative assumptions, avoidance of double counting, reversal accounting, and transparent disclosure of how the sourcing region boundary was drawn.
- Jurisdiction (country or sub-national region): Emissions only. No removals claims are permitted under scope 3 at this level.
- No physical traceability: Emissions only, using fallback defaults. No removals.
The implication is clear: if your company wants to report removals in its GHG inventory, you need traceability at minimum to the sourcing region — and you need data infrastructure to match. For most food retailers and brands, getting there will require structured supplier engagement, not year-end data requests.
Why this matters now
Three forces are converging on the same timeline. The LSRS is final and normative. CSRD and ESRS E1 are making scope 3 disclosure mandatory for large European food companies from FY2026 onwards, with assurance requirements that will benchmark your data quality against the new Standard. And SBTi FLAG is aligning its target-setting framework with LSRS categories, including land-based emissions, removals, and leakage.
Companies that operationalise the LSRS in 2026 will shape the peer benchmark. Companies that wait until 2027 will scramble to meet it.
For food retailers, grocers, and producers who have built part of their sustainability narrative around carbon removals — whether through regenerative agriculture programmes, soil carbon projects, or agroforestry partnerships — the question is no longer whether to comply, but how quickly you can get your traceability, data quality, and monitoring infrastructure to the level the Standard demands.
Where to start
If you’re a food company wondering where this leaves your current scope 3 methodology, here are four concrete steps:
- Map your current methodology against the 32 requirements. Identify the gaps — particularly around traceability tiering, biogenic CO₂ separation, and the two new mandatory metrics (land occupation and land carbon leakage).
- Assess your removals claims. Do they meet the five gates? If not, be transparent about the gap rather than risk a claim that can’t survive assurance.
- Invest in supplier-level traceability. Sourcing-region-level traceability is the minimum for removals. Getting there means working with suppliers to establish physical traceability to first points of aggregation, with empirical data on carbon stock changes.
- Build supplier engagement into the workflow. The Standard’s new disclosure KPI — the percentage of scope 3 emissions calculated using supplier-specific data — means primary-data collection can’t be a year-end scramble. It needs to be integrated into category management and procurement cycles.
The LSRS represents a step change in how the food industry accounts for its relationship with land and climate. For companies ready to meet it, it’s also an opportunity: the ones that get their data infrastructure right will define what credible scope 3 reporting looks like for the sector.
CarbonCloud’s scope 3 engine is built to align with the LSRS accounting architecture out of the box — from mandatory category disaggregation to traceability tiering and supplier-specific data collection. Get in touch to learn how we can help your team operationalise the new Standard.
