About greenhouse gas accounts
A farmer or land manager uses a GHG account to record GHG emissions and carbon stored. They or their advisers keep the account. It is an ‘account’ only in the sense that it records:
- ‘debits’ (scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions)
- ‘credits’ (carbon stored)
- the resulting balance.
The opening balance of an account is GHG emissions minus carbon stored, estimated for a defined period. The opening balance helps in understanding your emissions sources. It provides a starting point or a baseline against which you can measure the progress of carbon farming activities to reduce emissions and store carbon.
The emissions boundary covered by your footprint may be all the sources of emissions and increase in carbon storage on your land, or it may also include your supply chain. The boundary should be defined in line with your purpose for determining your footprint and any associated requirements you may need to meet.
There are different ways to construct a GHG account, and the approach you use depends on the purpose of preparing the account. It might be a simple account with limited, approximate data to, for example, track livestock emissions over time. Or the account might conform to a standard (such as a Climate Active Standard), to support a farmer’s claims about the emissions intensity of their products (such as wool, meat and grain). Depending on the purpose of an account, it may record insetting and offsets in addition to emissions and carbon stored.
The government is developing voluntary emissions estimation and reporting guidelines (Guidelines) for agriculture, fisheries and forestry industries. The Guidelines are focused on estimating farm-level emissions from cradle to farm-gate and will be updated annually to align with the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory.
The Guidelines will be published in mid-2026 and aim to:
- Improve the consistency and quality of farm-level GHG accounting methods.
- Enhance the consistency and quality of the emissions estimates calculated by GHG accounting tools used by primary producers.
‘Carbon’ vs ‘greenhouse gas’
The commonly used term ‘carbon accounting’ generally refers to accounting for all GHGs, not just carbon dioxide and stored carbon.