Scope 3 emissions

Scope 3 covers the indirect greenhouse-gas emissions that happen in the value chain but outside the sources the organisation owns or the power it buys — the emissions embedded in the purchased goods and services, the capital goods, the fuel and energy the supplier burned before delivery, the transportation the logistics provider runs, the waste the haulier takes, the business travel, the employee commute, and the use and the end-of-life of the product the company sold. The GHG Protocol defines 15 categories, split upstream and downstream, and Scope 3 is almost always the largest share of the corporate footprint — 70 to 90 per cent for most companies — because the value chain is bigger than the operator and the power station combined.

The difficulty of Scope 3 is the data. Scope 1 and 2 sit on the operator site and the electricity meter; Scope 3 sits in the supplier the operator does not control, and the supplier number is a spend-based estimate or a sector average until the supplier reports its own footprint. The reduction lever is supply-chain engagement — the procurement clause that asks the supplier for its Scope 1 and 2, the contract that rewards the lower-carbon supplier, the design choice that cuts the embodied carbon of the product — and the honest Scope 3 target is the one that names the categories the company can actually move, not the 15 categories reported once and forgotten. The science-based target is the discipline that ties Scope 3 to the 1.5-degree trajectory. See GHG Protocol, Scope 2, and ESG.