The new Net-Zero Standard makes room for landscape-scale action provided you can measure it

The Science Based Targets initiative published Version 2.0 of its Corporate Net-Zero Standard on 11 June 2026. The shift is from ambition to implementation. For most sectors that means greater flexibility in how targets are set and met. For companies sourcing forest and agricultural commodities, the implications are more specific because the most important changes sit in the treatment of Scope 3 emissions. 

The implications also carry a timing imperative: the evidence base the standard rewards takes years rather than months to assemble, so for a company that wants to use the new flexibility when V2.0 becomes mandatory on 1 January 2028, the work that matters should start soon.

For FLAG, the implementation hierarchy is the headline

For FLAG companies, the most consequential change in V2.0 is the new implementation hierarchy. It applies across all three scopes and starts from a simple principle: act as close to the source of emissions as possible.

The first step remains action at the activity level. Companies are expected to reduce emissions within their own inventory and work with suppliers and customers where necessary. In FLAG terms, that means interventions linked to a specific emission source through a credible chain of custody. The SBTi still treats this as the preferred route.

What has changed is what companies can do when that link cannot be made. In agricultural supply chains, traceability often breaks down long before the farm. Commodities are mixed, intermediaries are numerous and production may be spread across thousands of smallholders. In those circumstances, connecting a particular intervention to a particular source is often impossible.

V2.0 allows companies to work instead at the activity-pool level. This is the smallest boundary within which contributing activities can no longer be distinguished. For FLAG, that will often mean a supply shed: a defined sourcing region where a company can support emissions reductions across the system over time.

This is also the level at which market instruments such as commodity certificates can be used. Mass-balance and book-and-claim approaches are permitted, subject to requirements around traceability, double counting and claims. Buyers should not assume these instruments are fully mature, however. Many of the underlying systems and assurance mechanisms are still developing.

Only when action is not feasible even at the activity-pool level does the hierarchy move to the sector level. Companies must explain why higher levels of intervention are not possible and show that sector-wide action complements, rather than replaces, efforts to reduce emissions closer to source.

Why this lands differently for forests and farmland

For buyers of cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soy, rubber or timber, the supply-shed provision is the critical one. Agricultural change rarely happens plot by plot. It happens across sourcing regions, farmer networks and surrounding ecosystems: the same scales at which insetting and landscape programmes already operate. EUDR is an enabling condition here, as the geolocation and farm-polygon data companies are already collecting to meet its due diligence requirements give them the plot-level foundation that supply-shed accounting builds on.

Until now, those programmes sat awkwardly against a standard built around a company's own traceable footprint. V2.0 gives them a defined place in the accounting.

Jurisdictional and landscape approaches only work if someone can measure carbon change across a region, and that is the gap companies like Chloris fill. We made the case for landscape-scale measurement in an earlier article, but the conclusion is hardly unique. Organisations working closest to production have arrived at similar positions. The Rainforest Alliance, after decades of work in sourcing landscapes, argues that deforestation, water stress and rural livelihoods cannot be addressed in isolation and developed LandScale to assess sustainability at landscape scale. The World Economic Forum describes jurisdictional approaches as a shift from supply chains to landscapes. The Accountability Framework Initiative goes further, describing landscape- and jurisdiction-scale investment as integral to responsible supply chains rather than separate from them.

Flexibility comes with integrity conditions

The new flexibility around where action can count is balanced by requirements that have not become any easier. V2.0 still requires activity matching, conservative quantification of uncertainty (disclosing uncertainty ranges and applying the most cautious estimates), verifiability, independent assurance and protection against double counting. Satisfying activity matching demands spatially explicit evidence linked to the sourcing landscape. Meanwhile, conservative quantification of uncertainty necessitates reporting on uncertainty rather than relying on point estimates, and verifiability and independent assurance depend on employing a methodology that withstands rigorous third-party auditing. Companies must also demonstrate that a less traceable intervention is genuinely connected to the system from which they source.

In practice, every one of those requirements depends on measurement. A supply-shed claim that cannot be measured cannot be matched, quantified conservatively (see picture below for Chloris’s example) or independently assured. The new flexibility is only as useful as the evidence behind it. 

Example output from Chloris’ intuitive platform, showing CO₂e gains in primary peat forests, with uncertainty bounds provided for every reported estimate.

Acting credibly at supply-shed or jurisdictional scale requires consistent, spatially explicit evidence of how forest carbon is changing across a region over time. , measured to a standard that can withstand third-party scrutiny. To establish this level of audibility, Chloris Geospatial partnered with SustainCERT to co-author the white paper titled Operationalizing the GHG Protocol LSR Standard, which details how remote sensing stock-change methodologies align the GHG Protocol’s Land Sector and Removals (LSR) Standard. Satellite-based biomass measurement of the kind Chloris tracks carbon stocks and carbon change across sourcing regions directly, with quantified uncertainty and a consistent method across the whole sourcing region, rather than inferring outcomes from land-cover proxies that detect where trees are, not how much carbon they hold or lose..

Without that evidence base, the supply-shed pathway risks becoming an easier route to a claim rather than a defensible one. The integrity provisions are intended to prevent precisely that outcome.

Ongoing emissions and removals point beyond 2030

Two other features of V2.0 offer a sense of where the standard is heading.

The first is Ongoing Emissions Responsibility, which replaces Beyond Value Chain Mitigation. For now it sits within a voluntary recognition programme that gives tiered credit to companies investing beyond their value chains. High-integrity carbon credits belong here as a complement to reductions, not a substitute for them, and they no longer count towards Scope 3 targets.

Participation remains voluntary, but the signal is clear. Companies investing today in high-integrity mitigation, including nature-based projects, are positioning themselves in a market that is likely to face growing demand and constrained supply.

The second concerns removals. Rather than prescribing a fixed split between technology-based and nature-based approaches, V2.0 matches the durability of a removal to the emission it is intended to address while holding all removals to the same integrity standard.

That keeps high-quality nature-based removals firmly in play. The burden, as elsewhere in the standard, is evidential. Outcomes have to be measured and verified, not simply claimed.

The timeline leaves room (for companies that start measuring now)

Version 1.3.1 remains available for target submissions through 2027. Version 2.0 will be available from early 2027 and becomes mandatory for new targets from 1 January 2028. Companies will be grouped into large and mid-market categories and an SME category, with obligations scaled accordingly.

That gives companies time to adapt, but building the evidence base is a slower process.

A target baseline that works at plot, supply-shed and jurisdictional level cannot be assembled in the months before a submission. It depends on historical data, methodological consistency and time for validation. Because Chloris reconstructs historical, back-dated baselines directly from years of archived satellite imagery, a company beginning today does not begin from zero: the historical record required already exists and can be measured retrospectively, with quantified uncertainty, across plot, supply-shed and jurisdictional scales: the companies best placed to use the new flexibility in 2028 are likely to be those building that capability now.

The standard has made room for action at the scale forests and farmland actually change. Turning that room into credible targets is now, above all, a measurement problem.

Start building your evidence base now. Get in touch →info@chloris.earth

Chloris provides the biomass data and reporting infrastructure FLAG companies need to act credibly at plot, supply-shed, and jurisdiction scale.