5.1 Overview and Relationship With the Corporate Standard and Scope 3 Standard

The Scope 2 Guidance was released in 2015, 11 years after the revised edition of the Corporate Standard was published. It acts as an amendment to the Corporate Standard and provides clarity for reporting companies to measure emissions from electricity and other types of energy purchases through updated requirements and leading practices on Scope 2 accounting and reporting. Specifically, it introduces accounting and reporting requirements related to Scope 2 emissions that either replace or add to those in the Corporate Standard. To prepare an inventory that conforms with the Corporate Standard, companies must comply with all of the requirements of the Scope 2 Guidance.

In addition, the Scope 2 Guidance has implications for reporting under the Scope 3 Standard in the following ways:

Companies may communicate information about their Scope 2 emissions to other companies that are downstream within their value chain or, conversely, may request information from others that are upstream within their value chain for purposes of reporting Scope 3 emissions. As a result, the Scope 2 Guidance affects the information shared among value chain partners.
The Scope 2 Guidance affects how a reporting company measures the upstream emissions associated with its energy use when reporting GHG emissions in Scope 3, Category 3 (fuel- and energy-related activities not included in Scope 1 or Scope 2).

In both of these scenarios, a reporting company is required to disclose whether a market-based or location-based Scope 2 total is used as the basis for calculating Scope 3 emissions within Category 3. Said differently, a reporting company can choose which calculation method is used for calculating Scope 3 emissions within Category 3 and does not need to dually report them. See Section 5.2 for more information about the market-based and location-based methods. See Section 5.6 for information about how to calculate Scope 2 emissions under each method.