Bridging the climate-corporate gap: utilizing GWP* with GWP100 for livestock companies' greenhouse gas inventories
Frontiers in Climate (Frontiers Media SA)Klopatek, Thompson, Sara E. Place, Matthew R. Beck18 Aug 2026cc-byRead the original
Article states it is open access under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), copyright the authors, 2026. Frontiers research articles are standardly CC BY 4.0; the CC BY status is confirmed on the page, the 4.0 version specifically is inferred from Frontiers policy.
Klopatek and colleagues propose a method allowing livestock companies to report emissions using both GWP100, the metric required by existing corporate accounting standards, and GWP*, which evaluates how changing emission rates of short-lived pollutants affect global surface temperature over time. GWP* normally requires 20 years of baseline data, which most companies do not hold; the authors address this with a shadow company technique that calculates GWP* from a chosen baseline reporting year onward. The approach is demonstrated on a hypothetical Global Beef Company operating in Brazil, Australia and the United States, with scope 3 livestock emissions estimated using the procedures meat packers and retailers currently apply. Reduction and growth scenarios are modelled over 80 years, and the authors introduce a Cumulative Intensity indicator reporting both metrics per unit of product.
Contested
Extract
"Corporations must follow established standards when developing their emission accounting frameworks and reports. This standard necessitates that the various greenhouse gas (GHG) species are reported on a carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalence (CO2-e) basis using the global warming potential (GWP) metric on a 100-year timeframe (GWP100). However, GWP100 was developed to evaluate the warming contributions of a pulse or one-off emissions compared with an equivalent pulse emission of CO2. Accordingly, the GWP100 metric does not account for scenarios of changing emission rates, which is an important factor for determining the warming effects of short-term climate pollutants." "With the emergence of GWP* there has been increasing interest in adopting this metric into corporate reporting. However, the 20-year baseline data required to calculate GWP* has limited companies' ability to incorporate GWP* into their current GHG reporting inventories. To bridge the gap between GWP* and corporate accounting we developed a straightforward methodology to enable companies to dual report GWP* and GWP100 based on current GHG reporting inventories. Specifically, the methodology developed a 'shadow company' technique that will allow GWP* to be calculated from a specified baseline reporting year and onwards." "To realistically model a multi-national corporate GHG inventory, we developed a mock company, titled the Global Beef Company that operated in Brazil, Australia, and the United States. The GHG inventory was modeled and calculated using the same procedures currently employed by meat packers and retailers for estimating their scope 3 livestock GHG emissions. Emission reduction and growth scenarios were modeled over an 80-year time scale to demonstrate the long-term effects on warming."
Frontiers in Climate (Frontiers Media SA) · cc-by · Read the original
The MyGreenSuit briefing
Commentary by MyGreenSuit, not the words of Frontiers in Climate (Frontiers Media SA).
Read the Carbon Brief explainer first. This is the operational form of that argument — a step-by-step template for putting both metrics in one corporate inventory, modelled on a mock global beef company using the same scope 3 procedures packers and retailers already run.
Two things about it are genuinely useful. The shadow-company technique solves a real blocker: GWP* normally needs twenty years of baseline data that almost no company holds. And the Cumulative Intensity indicator produces something reportable per unit of product, which is the form the question usually arrives in from a customer.
The thing to be clear-eyed about is that under stable emissions the cumulative GWP* figure comes out substantially below GWP100, and that difference is created entirely by the choice of metric. Nothing has been emitted differently.
Two of the four authors work in livestock sustainability research. That does not invalidate the method — the method is transparent — but the paper is arguing a position. The honest way to use it is the way the authors themselves recommend: disclose gas by gas, so a reader can compute either metric and neither headline is doing the persuading.