The Land Emissions Blind Spot Food Companies Need to Close Before 2027

Stockholm, Thursday 13 August 2026 | For as long as food businesses have been measuring emissions, one part of the footprint has been treated as a rounding error. Fuel and electricity get itemized, checked, and reported down to the decimal. Within purchased food, land, the ground where the food actually comes from, has mostly been reported as a black box and moved on from. 

That's about to change. On January 30, 2026, the GHG Protocol released the Land Sector and Removals Standard, or LSRS, the first global standard for accounting emissions and CO₂ removals from agriculture and land use. It takes effect January 1, 2027, which means 2026 activity data is what most companies will use for their first reporting cycle under it. For food and beverage businesses, that's not a distant compliance date anymore.

Land Was Always the Biggest Number Nobody Could Defend

Agriculture, forestry, and land use change account for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and food systems as a whole for close to a third. For most food businesses, these emissions sit in Scope 3, and until now there was no consistent GHG Protocol method to measure them. Companies reported what they could, usually one blended figure, because no standard forced anything more specific.

Food companies weren't ignoring land emissions. The accounting infrastructure to report them with any rigor simply didn't exist yet. The LSRS closes that gap, and it does so by asking for a level of detail most companies aren't currently set up to produce.

What the Standard Actually Demands

The LSRS splits land-sector emissions into categories that used to be reported as one number. Land use change, the CO₂ released when natural ecosystems are converted to farmland, now has to be reported separately from land management, the ongoing emissions from land already in agricultural use. Land management splits further into net biogenic CO₂ and the non-CO₂ gases from fertilizer and livestock, since methane and nitrous oxide warm the climate far more than CO₂ per tonne.

Underneath all of it sits traceability. The standard ties the specificity a company is allowed to report to how well it can trace its ingredients back to where they were actually grown. Global averages are still permitted, but the more precisely a company knows its sourcing, down to a region or a specific farm, the more accurate a number it can report, and the more credibly it can claim a reduction or a removal. Traceability determines what a company is even allowed to say.

This is also where the standard is deliberately conservative. Removals, the carbon drawn back out of the atmosphere through practices like agroforestry or improved soil management, can only be reported when a company has primary data, traceability to the specific land, ongoing monitoring, and a buffer against reversal. All four, not some. Soil carbon in particular can take years to verify and can reverse if land use changes again, so the standard would rather a company leave a removal out than claim one it can't stand behind. It's a higher bar than most voluntary carbon claims have had to meet, and the right one.

Why This Is Harder for Food Than for Almost Anyone Else

General carbon accounting wasn't built with food's supply chains in mind, and land data makes that gap especially visible. Food sourcing spans hundreds of ingredient categories, seasonal variation, and international procurement, and land emissions shift depending on exactly where and how something was grown. A platform built to serve every industry at once has no reason to carry that granularity, and most don't.

That leaves food businesses in a specific bind heading into 2027. The standard asks for gas-by-gas, traceability-linked data. Most existing tools produce one number per ingredient, sourced from whatever data was available, with no components or sourcing evidence attached. Meeting the standard requires the underlying data itself to change shape.

How Klimato Is Building Toward It

Klimato's methodology already separates land use change from land management, and already applies the standard's required approach to land conversion, spreading its emissions across a 20-year look-back rather than charging them entirely to a single year. That's a starting point, not the finished work. We're extending our emission factors to report land management gas by gas, separating fossil carbon from biogenic and land-based carbon, and refreshing the underlying data with sources that report at this level of detail.

The database is changing alongside the factors. We're building it to store emission factors at multiple spatial resolutions, from global averages down to farm level, each tagged with its source, its data quality, and the traceability level it supports. A company reporting at country level and one reporting at farm level should each get a defensible number, not the same average dressed up differently. Where a customer can supply validated farm-level data, that data strengthens the database going forward rather than being used once and set aside.

None of this replaces the review our methodology already carries. Our database and label methodology is reviewed by WRI's Coolfood Initiative, and our product carbon footprint methodology by Bureau Veritas. Aligning to the LSRS extends that reviewed foundation on the standard's own timeline.

We'll be publishing more detail on our methodology as this alignment work progresses. In the meantime, if you want to understand where your land-related emissions sit and what traceability would take to build, book a demo and we'll walk through it together.

About Klimato
Klimato is a food emissions measurement and carbon accounting solution built for the food and beverage industry. We help food businesses—including contract caterers, hotel groups, restaurant groups, and food producers—measure, report, and reduce their food-related emissions using verified, activity-based data. Klimato works with leading companies including Hilton, Radisson Hotel Group, Accor, SSP, and The Restaurant Group.

Press Contact
Jheri Malm, Growth Marketing Lead
jheri@klimato.com