A new perspective for businesses to scale climate innovations
In a world striving for a Net Zero future, businesses are in need for credible ways to measure their contributions to global decarbonization efforts. An important part of the answer to this challenge lies in the concepts of Avoided Emissions and intervention-based impact accounting.
Welcome to WBCSD’s dedicated page on Avoided Emissions. Avoided Emission are a critical concept to scale low-carbon solutions and show companies’ ability to solve climate challenges. This page provides access to our Guidance on Avoided Emissions , industry use cases, sector-specific methodologies, as well as guides for finance and policy actors.
Pioneering a global standard
The WBCSD Guidance on Avoided Emissions is takes the first critical step towards reconciling avoided emissions and intervention-based carbon accounting with globally recognized inventory-based carbon accounting standards.
We released the first version of the Guidance on Avoided Emissions in 2023. The Guidance was presented by our leadership at the Sapporo G7 Ministers Meeting in April 2023, and was endorsed in the 2023 G7 Climate, Energy and Environment Ministers’ final communiqué. A refined version of the Guidance was released in 2025 after a 2-year structured testing program with WBCSD member companies and a 60-day open consultation period. Over 100 multinational companies and expert organizations contributed to the updated WBCSD Guidance on Avoided Emissions.
This document seeks to bring methodologicalharmonization and provide concrete guidance on how companies can assess and disclose avoided emissions. We aim to help companies utilizing the decarbonizing impact of their solutions in decision-making and for competitive advantage.
"We at Panasonic have been disclosing Avoided Emissions since 2023 in accordance with the WBCSD Guidance. Since its endorsement in the communiqué of the G7 Hiroshima Summit, financial institutions have considered to use Avoided Emissions as one of the indicators for measuring positive impact. We are convinced that further integration of avoided emissions into global climate standards will enable companies to clearly indicate their ability to solve climate challenges, and eventually accelerate the decarbonization of society."
— Dr. Hirotoshi Uehara
Executive Officer, Quality & Environment Lead at Panasoni
Since 2018, we’ve used ISO-compliant, peer-reviewed life cycle assessments to measure the environmental impact of our products. In 2024, we took this further by conducting comparative climate assessments across our portfolio and quantifying the pressures our products help avoid — including emissions, land use, and water consumption. Using WBCSD’s methodology on avoided emissions, we gained valuable insights into how our products contribute to decarbonising the food system.
— Sally Smith
Chief Sustainability Officer, Flora Food Group
The collaboration on avoided emissions with the WBCSD team and the exchange with industry peers have been indispensable cornerstones in forging our avoided emissions measurement and disclosure system.
— Wei Liu
ESG Strategy Lead, Alibaba Group
WBCSD Avoided Emissions guidelines allow organisations to estimate their impact in a robust and credible way, aligned with their peers, while increasing transparency on climate solutions' contributions to a net zero world.
— Victor Gancel
Climate & Decarbonization Lead at Danfoss
Our collaboration with the WBCSD team on avoided emissions has been instrumental in recognizing the full value of the positive impact that OCP’s solutions can have on soil health and farmer resilience. By applying the WBCSD guidance, we have been able to assess the avoided emissions generated by OCP’s products and initiatives that support farmers in adopting sustainable agricultural practices while contributing to the global food security.
— Yousra Ben Bouker
Senior Lead Climate Action Program
Why avoided emissions matter?
How we're building the primary platform to scale low-carbon solutions?
Implementation
Identifying and implementing avoided emissions solutions is a focal point of our work. Therefore, we are committed to sharing use cases and insights through a dedicated repository to create best practices and improve methodological approaches. Additionally, we provide sector-specific applications of the WBCSD Avoided Emissions guidance to harmonize methodological approaches and provide managerial guidance. The first sector guidance documents are available for the ag&food and built environment sectors. We are currently working on sector guidance for the energy, transport/mobility, and forest sectors.
Finance & Policy
Collaboration is at the heart of our approach to mobilize systems transformation. We are actively engaging with leading finance and policy actors to co-develop methodologies and instruments that fund and incentivize low-carbon solutions. Our collaborators include the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF), Prime Coalition, and the Impact Convergence Forum. Our goal is to strengthen the relationship between industry, policy and private/public transition finance agendas and provide solution-directionality for decarbonization pathways and capital mobilization.
Methodology & Standard
In our ongoing pursuit of transparency and practicability, we are dedicated to developing and enhancing the leading cross-sectoral framework on avoided emissions accounting. This involves constant efforts to increase robustness, usability, and adoption while engaging with established standard bodies such as GHG Protocol, ISO, IEC, and SBTi. We are playing a pivotal role in the formalization and standardization of intervention-based GHG accounting which provides the methodoligical foundation for specialized methodologies, e.g., in context of market-based instruments.
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