Climate reporting map: what the organisation files, and why the supplier has to be invited

You are the reporting entity. The sustainability report is yours. The suppliers behind your purchased goods are not filers, and they will not open an account to find you.

This is the map of what the file has to carry, and the operating fact underneath it. The value-chain lines become a grant only after you invite the supplier.

The GHG Protocol, then the Australian filing

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol is the accounting family. Scope 3 sits inside it. FLAG does not: FLAG is a Science Based Targets initiative target, and the inventory under that target is still a GHG Protocol inventory.

Corporate Standard. Scope 1 is what you burn or leak on sites you own or control. Scope 2 is purchased electricity, steam, heat, and cooling. Scope 3 is every other indirect emission in the value chain. You pick one organisational boundary — equity share, financial control, or operational control — and you keep it. Offsets stay outside the totals. Biogenic carbon dioxide is reported on its own.

Scope 3 Standard. This is also a GHG Protocol standard, the Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Accounting and Reporting Standard (2011). It sorts the value chain the Corporate Standard already called Scope 3 into 15 categories. A conforming inventory reports each category in tonnes of CO2 equivalent, says what was left out and why, and says how much of the figure came from suppliers rather than an industry average.

Land Sector and Removals Standard. This is the GHG Protocol’s rule for land emissions and removals: land-use change, land management, and carbon stored in soils and trees. Emissions and removals stay in separate columns. From 1 January 2027 a FLAG inventory uses this standard. Until then, the 2022 draft guidance is still available.

FLAG. The SBTi Forest, Land and Agriculture Guidance (version 1.2, March 2026) is the target a company sets on that land inventory, if it chooses SBTi validation. It is not a GHG Protocol standard, and it is not an Australian statute. A portfolio Category 1 estimate is not farm-level FLAG data.

Australia. Chapter 2M of the Corporations Act decides who prepares a sustainability report. The content of that report is AASB S2, and AASB S2 points back to the GHG Protocol for how emissions are measured, including the 15 Scope 3 categories. The National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting scheme and the Safeguard Mechanism are separate returns. They collect Scope 1, Scope 2, and energy. They do not collect Scope 3.

Supplier Share sits under those rules. It holds the supplier grant and the export. It does not write the sustainability report, and it is not your assurer.

Who files in Australia

You prepare a sustainability report if you already prepare a financial report under Chapter 2M and you meet a size test, an NGER test, or an assets test. ASIC Regulatory Guide 280 sets out the three groups.

In the first year an entity applies AASB S2, it may omit Scope 3 (paragraph C4(b)). From the second reporting year, Scope 3 is in the statement.

As of October 2026 the calendar looks like this. A Group 1 entity on a calendar year is in that second year for the period that began on 1 January 2026, and the package is generally lodged in 2027. A Group 1 entity with a 30 June year end is still inside the first-year relief for the year ended 30 June 2026. The year that began on 1 July 2026 is when that entity discloses Scope 3. Group 2 periods that began on 1 July 2026 are first-year periods. Group 3 starts with periods beginning on or after 1 July 2027.

Scope 2 in the statement is the location-based total. Renewable contracts are described beside it when they help a reader understand that total. They do not replace it.

Where a law requires the NGER measurement method for part of the entity, that method covers that part only. It does not remove Scope 3.

NGER itself is a different filing. A facility reports at 25,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, or 100 terajoules of energy. A corporate group reports at 50,000 tonnes, or 200 terajoules. The Safeguard Mechanism applies to facilities above 100,000 tonnes of Scope 1. Baselines decline 4.9% a year through 30 June 2030. Many food organisations will have an AASB S2 report and no Safeguard facility. Keep the returns separate.

Under AUASB ASSA 5010, assurance in the first reporting year is limited. It covers Scope 1, Scope 2, governance, and the description of climate risks and opportunities. Scope 3 sits outside that first assurance scope. Later years widen.

What else the statement carries

Governance: who oversees climate, and what management does with it.

Strategy: the risks and opportunities, what they mean for the business, the transition plan, and a resilience assessment. ASIC’s guidance is to use at least two scenarios referable to the temperature outcomes in the Climate Change Act 2022.

Risk management: how climate risk is found, judged, and run with the rest of the risk process.

Other metrics: assets or activities exposed to transition risk, to physical risk, and to climate-related opportunities; capital deployed toward climate; any internal carbon price; the share of executive pay linked to climate.

Targets you have set, and targets the law imposes, including a Safeguard baseline where you have one. For a greenhouse-gas target, name the gases, the scopes, whether it is gross or net, and any planned use of carbon credits. A net target is published with the gross target beside it.

The fifteen Scope 3 categories

You consider all fifteen. You disclose which ones are in the total. A category inside the minimum boundary can be left out only with a reason. For a food or retail organisation, category 1 is almost always the line that matters.

For each category the inventory names the total, what is included, what is excluded and why, the activity data and the factors, the method and any allocation, and the share calculated from supplier or partner data. Biogenic CO2 sits outside the category total.

AASB S2 uses the same category list. It also asks how far the Scope 3 total uses data from specific activities in the value chain, and how far that data is verified. Direct measurement and primary data are preferred. Industry averages are allowed. The statement says which you used.

FLAG, when the land lines are material

Set a FLAG target if the company is in a designated sector — forest and paper, agricultural production, animal-source food, food and beverage processing, food and staples retailing, or tobacco — or if gross FLAG emissions are 20% or more of Scopes 1, 2, and 3. Removals are excluded from that 20% test. Land-use change is included.

The target covers at least 95% of FLAG Scope 1 and 67% of FLAG Scope 3. Those two tests stand apart from the energy and industry target. When gross Scope 3 is 40% or more of Scopes 1–3, the energy and industry Scope 3 target has its own 67% as well.

The inventory under the target includes land-use change (direct or statistical — not both stacked as if they were different emissions), land management out to the farm gate or the forest yard, and removals. Emissions and removals are reported separately. Removals do not shrink the reductions the target still requires.

A no-deforestation commitment is part of setting the target. The cutoff date is expected to be 2020 or earlier. The target date is no later than two years after submission, and no later than 31 December 2030. The commodities to assess are cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soy, and timber, including feed embedded in animal products. A commodity is in the commitment when it is at least 1% of sourced FLAG volume.

The numbers in that inventory are GHG Protocol land-sector accounting, as set out above. FLAG adds the target boundary, the coverage tests, and the no-deforestation commitment.

None of this enrols the farm or the mid-tier plant as an SBTi member. It tells the company with the target what can honestly sit in the FLAG column. An anonymised intensity can support a portfolio estimate. It is not farm-level land-management data. Named evidence is a separate grant. The supplier-side version of that distinction is in You are not an AASB S2 filer.

Averages can start the file. They cannot finish the supplier lines.

AASB S2 presumes Scope 3 can be estimated with secondary data. A factor set can produce a first number. It cannot say which lot went to which factory, who consented, or whether the supplier can take the figure back.

Companies on a FLAG path are expected to move past industry averages on the land lines over time. The figure an assurer can test is a supplier’s own activity, for a named period and a named product, granted to your organisation on purpose.

That figure does not appear because a portal exists. Suppliers do not browse Supplier Share looking for buyers. There is no public catalogue. A supplier uses the platform when a buying organisation invites them.

What you do

1. Request buyer access. The portal opens after the request is approved.
2. Invite the suppliers on the purchased-goods lines that matter. Start with the FLAG commodities, then the rest of category 1. An invite links them to your network. It does not move any numbers.
3. They choose which buyers receive each result. The same result can go to more than one buyer. They never pay. How sharing works is on How it works.
4. Keep Scope 1, Scope 2, any NGER return, and the sustainability report in your own file. Export the shared lines into that working paper. The export is an input. It is not the statement.

If you are a supplier who was sent this page, you are not the filer unless your own company meets the tests above. The buyer’s report is their duty. Your spreadsheet is a commercial ask.

Bottom line

The GHG Protocol is the method: the Corporate Standard for the three scopes, the Scope 3 Standard for the 15 categories, and the Land Sector and Removals Standard for land emissions and removals. FLAG is the SBTi target a company may set on that land inventory. AASB S2 is the Australian statement, and it measures emissions with the Protocol. Category 1 is where your suppliers sit inside that statement. They share it when you invite them.