The ‘land grid’ – why Scope 3 is having its Scope 2 moment

It took the Scope 2 electricity market twenty years to evolve from a grid average emissions approach into a sophisticated, market-based ecosystem of Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), Guarantees of Origin (GOs), Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs), and hourly matching. 

The arguments against that evolution – companies can’t claim renewable electricity they didn’t physically consume; certificates are just paper; the grid doesn’t care who bought what – are the same ones we’re now hearing about land usage emissions. 

But the answer is the same: imperfect early instruments are the necessary foundation for the market that made precision possible. Hourly matching exists today because someone, two decades ago, was willing to issue RECs.

We’re now at exactly that point for land-based emissions. The difference is that this time the infrastructure has arrived faster than the institutional courage to use it.

In the space of a few weeks this year, two documents quietly redefined what corporate climate accounting is about to look like. The AIM Platform Standard V1.0 and the GHG Protocol’s AMI Phase 1 white paper both reach the same conclusion: the single corporate inventory is finished. 

In its place comes a ‘multi-ledger’ architecture – one physical inventory for the emissions your activity caused, one contractual inventory for the book-and-claim certificates that finance change in your supply chain, and an impact statement for the consequential outcomes your investment actually delivered. 

None of these can be netted against the others. None of them are footnotes. All of them sit inside corporate reports as first-class disclosure objects.

The GHG Protocol’s Land Sector and Removals Standard (LSRS), effective January 2027, has already supplied the physical inventory leg of this architecture. It’s unambiguously attributional – what your sourcing activity caused on traceable lands – but with a critical concession: companies with sourcing traceability on a spatial boundary or regional level (a company’s ‘supply shed’), not just farm-gate (or land management unit – LMU), can now include Scope 3 removals and reductions inside their physical inventory, provided the safeguards are met. 

The ‘supply shed’ has finally been recognised as a unit of accounting. The GHG Protocol Standard, for the first time, builds a rigorous attributional inventory anchored in physical traceability, with sourcing region as the minimum spatial boundary for any emissions removal or reduction claim. It’s the right tool for what it measures and, by design, it can’t capture interventions outside the spatial boundary it can verify.

The part no-one is saying loud enough is that standards bodies are no longer arguing about whether book-and-claim and consequential accounting belong in corporate climate reporting. They’re arguing about how, and that argument is almost over.

Two carbon accounting approaches, two questions

For two decades, we’ve measured climate progress with the wrong instrument.

Attributional emissions accounting answers a particular family of questions, and on its own terms it answers them well. Whose tonne was that? What share of last year’s atmospheric emissions burden belongs to my balance sheet? Which scope, which category, which year, which product? 

It’s the accounting of historical responsibility – necessary for comparability, transparency, and detecting greenwash. It’s also, on its own, almost silent on the only question that actually matters for climate.

Consequential accounting asks a different family of questions. What changed because I acted? Would that restoration project have happened without my investment? How much more carbon is stored in this landscape because finance flowed to it rather than past it? Is the emissions trajectory in this supply shed bending downward – and if so, by how much, and because of whom? Would the global atmosphere be different in 2030 if my company did not exist? 

These are the questions investors, boards, regulators and the public actually want answered. They are also the questions that determine whether climate spending is moving carbon, or just moving paper.

These aren’t competing approaches. They’re answers to different questions, and the field has spent twenty years answering the wrong one – and then complaining that the answer wasn’t useful. 

The new ledger architecture finally separates them, and lets each be reported, audited, and counted on its own terms. Attribution stays where it belongs: in the physical inventory, telling you what your activity caused. Consequence moves into the impact statement, telling you what your investment changed. Book-and-claim sits in the contractual inventory in between, telling you what your purchasing decisions financed. 

Three answers, three questions, three ledgers.

Building the land grid

This is where the metaphor of a ‘land grid’ becomes concrete. The renewable energy grid worked as a market because two things were true: The physical electrons are fungible – your kWh and mine are the same kWh – and the value of decarbonising one part of the grid is shared across everyone connected to it. 

An REC lets a buyer in New York pay for a wind farm in Texas, and over twenty years that flow of capital remade the Texan grid. Texas now generates more wind power than most countries. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta together signed multi-gigawatt PPAs that didn’t just decarbonise their own electricity – they built generation capacity that decarbonised the grid for everyone else. No single REC did that. The aggregate demand signal did.

A landscape works the same way, and for the same reasons. The carbon, water regulation, biodiversity, and resilience value of an intact forest in Côte d’Ivoire is shared across every buyer sourcing from that region – and across many who source from neighbouring regions. The carbon stored by a restored Cerrado catchment benefits every soy buyer downstream, every cattle rancher upstream, every food brand whose supply chain runs through the biome, and the global atmosphere. 

Trying to attribute this value to a single LMU transaction is like trying to attribute the Texas wind boom to a single household electricity bill. The maths don’t work because the value isn’t physical at the level of the contract. It’s systemic, and it requires systemic instruments.

A land grid says: the value is real, it’s measurable, and we’ll build the instruments that let finance flow to it. 

Consider what this looks like in practice. A consumer goods company sourcing cocoa from the Ashanti region in Ghana can retire a landscape Environmental Attribute Certificate (EAC) from a high-integrity carbon project backed by avoided-deforestation outcomes in that same region. The contractual inventory recognises the certificate against the cocoa line item. The impact statement reports the consequential carbon outcome. The physical inventory continues to capture what happened on the farms the company directly buys from. 

Three ledgers, one landscape, one supply chain, one set of trees – and a verifiable line of finance running from the corporate balance sheet to the forest that needed protecting. 

Or consider a soy buyer in the Cerrado financing jurisdictional conservation across hundreds of thousands of hectares: the same architecture, the same audit trail, the same shared value. Or a palm buyer co-investing in a peat-restoration programme across the supply shed: same again.

This isn’t a theoretical model. It’s what RECs did for electricity, transposed to land – with the crucial advantage that geospatial mapping makes the link between a buyer’s supply chain much sharper than anything the early electricity market had. 

We can see, from satellites, where the trees are. We can see whose supply chain runs through them. We know how to verify whether they remain standing. The integrity infrastructure is already more credible at year one than the Scope 2 market was at year ten.

Energy grid vs land grid: accounting approaches

Where Abatable sits in this

At Abatable, we’ve spent the last three years building exactly this infrastructure. By mapping land-based EACs and carbon credits – avoided deforestation, restoration, soil carbon, biodiversity corridors – against the actual sourcing geographies of cocoa, soy, palm, beef, and coffee, we’ve built portfolios where every project sits in a polygon connected, via independent geospatial data, to a real buyer’s supply shed. 

A cocoa buyer in the EU can see which restoration projects sit inside their direct sourcing region, which sit in the broader activity pool, and which support landscape-scale interventions adjacent to both. The pipes are laid. The connective tissue – AIM’s Association Test and the Science Based Target initiative’s activity pool concept – already exists. What’s missing is institutional will. Specifically, SBTi’s.

SBTi’s Corporate Net Zero Standard V2 is the most consequential near-term decision point in climate finance. The technical questions aren’t hard; the institutional posture is. SBTi doesn’t need to invent its own accounting standard – AIM and AMI have done that work. Its job is narrower and more important: decide which ledgers count, in what proportion, against which targets. 

If consequential outcomes – generated in a verifiable supply shed, registered in a preferred registry, audited to a real methodology – can’t contribute to a validated target, the multi-ledger project will end up as another well-intentioned framework that nobody pays for. The lesson of Scope 2 is precisely the opposite: standards that recognise instruments early build the markets that fund the precision the same standards later demand.

The forests being cleared while we debate accounting methodology won’t grow back on the timeline of our standards documents. They also won’t be saved by an integrity framework that’s so demanding it never generates the finance needed to protect them.

This is the era of pragmatism for climate, and it’s overdue. Pragmatism isn’t lower integrity. It’s the recognition that integrity is built by markets that exist, not by markets we wish into existence. Book-and-claim, properly governed, can do for land what it’s been doing for electricity for twenty years: turn diffuse demand into directed capital, and directed capital into measurable change on the ground.

The ledgers are open. The pen is in SBTi’s hand. The decade we’re entering will be defined less by what we measured, and more by what we changed. Let’s build the standards that match.

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