SBTi opens FLAG standard rewrite with a 12-month call for evidence

SBTi has begun rewriting its Forest, Land and Agriculture Standard with a call for evidence that will run more than 12 months, and the scope is broad by design as the initiative tests how the Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2, published in June 2026, applies to companies whose emissions run through agricultural and forestry supply chains. It is asking businesses across agriculture, forestry and land-based supply chains to submit evidence or join virtual stakeholder meetings, and it is seeking participation in particular from underrepresented regions central to global FLAG supply chains — Latin America and Southeast Asia among the regions it names. The rule ultimately has to hold for a commodity producer and a listed food manufacturer alike in different regulatory environments before a target can be compared across a portfolio.

The revision follows SBTi's Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2, which categorized companies by factors including market, size and country, moved target reviews to a five-year cycle, and widened the range of target-setting options. V2 also added a hierarchy covering how companies should implement targets and deliver emissions reductions, and SBTi now wants to assess how those approaches work for companies with significant land-related emissions — the population FLAG was built around. Coverage tied to the announcement also points to a draft power sector net-zero framework, a reminder that sector-specific rules are being re-cut to match the parent standard.

SBTi's second stated priority is alignment with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol's Land Sector and Removals Standard, which it says could prove important for companies navigating increasingly complex climate accounting requirements. Land is where the two standards overlap most awkwardly, since both touch the same acres, the same removals and the same corporate ledger — which makes the alignment question as much about what gets counted and where as about ambition. A company running both frameworks carries the compliance cost of whichever is stricter. The sequencing problem will be familiar to anyone watching the rest of the carbon market: Verra opened its Scope 3 registry in September with the accounting that would make companies buy still being written.

Companies do not have to wait for Version 2 to set targets, because SBTi said businesses should continue using the existing FLAG Guidance, Version 1.2 and can already apply two innovations from the Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2: the updated absolute contraction approach and the best-efforts framework for pursuing targets. More than 400 companies have already established FLAG targets, according to SBTi, and their implementation experience, alongside evidence from companies that have struggled with the existing requirements, will feed into the next version — a sign the current guidance has not fit every business it reached.

The revision arrives as land-intensive businesses work through a harder operating environment, with rising costs, evolving regulatory requirements and investor demands for stronger evidence of credible transition planning. Climate exposure across agriculture and forestry is acute because extreme weather can affect crop yields, commodity prices, supply availability and operating costs, and SBTi's framing is that FLAG emissions are at once a climate issue and a material business risk.

SBTi's framing matters beyond the sustainability function, because when land emissions show up in yield volatility and input costs, target-setting becomes a question for risk committees and lenders rather than only for communications teams, and the quality of the underlying accounting starts to carry a financing consequence.

Every land-based standard faces the same tension: rules precise enough to compare emissions across very different land uses, and flexible enough to work in the regions where the supply chains run. Keeping Version 1.2 live while letting companies fold in the V2 innovations is an attempt to avoid a reporting gap while the rules move. The test will be whether the underrepresented regions SBTi is courting show up in the evidence base, and whether alignment with the GHG Protocol produces one accounting language for land or two.