As part of its ambitious climate targets, the European Union has significantly increased the regulatory pressure on companies by introducing stricter requirements for reporting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These measures are a central component of the European Green Deal and aim to achieve climate neutrality in Europe by 2050.

Companies are now faced with the challenge of having to comply with complex regulations, even though the methodological details are often not yet widely known. This not only leads to confusion among practitioners but is also accompanied by a significant increase in workload and an additional need for financial resources. This no longer only affects large corporations, but increasingly also small and medium-sized companies that are either directly affected by new regulations or have to indirectly pass on required information to larger partners in the supply chain.

The recently published study “Back in the Driver's Seat: How New EU Greenhouse-Gas Reporting Schemes Challenge Corporate Accounting” analyzes the existing methodological requirements in detail and differentiates between GHG reporting and GHG accounting. While reporting refers to the disclosure of inventories to external stakeholders, accounting involves the precise collection, analysis and evaluation of GHG data within the company and beyond. The quality of reporting is therefore directly dependent on the accuracy and reliability of the underlying accounting data. Through an in-depth analysis of the various reporting schemes and the associated accounting requirements, the publication provides a comprehensive understanding of the methods required to prepare GHG emission inventories and thus lays the foundation for the development of improved and more efficient data management concepts that could reduce human and financial resources in the future.

The work was published as part of the project “Faster, easier, better – Life Cycle Modeling in the Information Age”, which was funded by the Merck Sustainability Hub, a joint research platform of Merck and TU Darmstadt.