The Mitigation Action Accounting and Reporting Guidance (MAARG) equips companies with the tools to transparently account for a wide range of ton-denominated climate actions. It provides clear methods and guidance for categorizing and disclosing both value chain–associated actions and investments outside a company’s value chain that do not appear in its physical GHG inventory but that deliver a measurable impact on global emissions.

The Target Accounting and Reporting Guidance (TARG) offers a structured framework for setting climate targets, tracking progress, and clearly communicating results. It supports consistent, comparable, and credible reporting across a variety of target types, enabling companies to accurately demonstrate performance and outcomes to stakeholders.

This guidance addresses four major gaps that have limited the effectiveness of corporate climate action and disclosure:

Completeness: Current frameworks don’t support full accounting for all relevant climate actions and outcomes and do not provide third party assurable guidance for critical transparency elements such as certain mitigation actions and progress reporting for targets. As a result, today companies are omitting important efforts since they are relying on outdated tools. This guidance fills that gap by providing a policy-neutral framework to disclose and account for a broader range of climate actions, including those beyond companies’ value chains that are critical to global decarbonization.

Transparency: Existing guidance often blurs the line between climate action that results in direct changes to atmospheric GHG emissions and accounting adjustments that reflect changes that would have taken place regardless of company action.This guidance improves transparency by clearly distinguishing emissions outcomes from inventory adjustments.

Standardization: Inconsistent methodologies across target types make it difficult to compare climate disclosures. This guidance introduces standardized methods and templates to enable consistent, comparable reporting for a full range of actions and target types.

Assurability: Many existing tools lack the specificity needed for third-party assurance, exposing companies to risk and discouraging ambitious, complete disclosures. This guidance supports third-party assurance with objective, auditable methodology that reduces risk and enables more confident action.

This guidance is designed to be complementary, policy-neutral, and flexible.

Complementary: This guidance fills important gaps in the current landscape of corporate climate guidance. Where relevant, it draws on and harmonizes with existing methodologies—such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHGP)—while including accounting and reporting practices that support a wide range of corporate climate actions and targets. It is designed to work alongside, not replace, existing standards.

Policy-Neutral: This guidance does not prescribe what companies should claim or what should or should not count toward a climate target. Instead, it provides practical guidance on how to account for and report a wide range of actions—whether a company has set a science-based target, an internal target, or another third-party target.

Flexible: This guidance is designed to meet companies where they are today while supporting greater ambition over time. It allows flexibility and optionality in how companies report, including which reporting statements they use, what types of targets they set, and which mitigation actions they choose to implement.

Yes. The guidance has been developed with input from a Big Four accounting firm to ensure it includes the necessary detail and rigor to support third-party assurance. It is designed to enable consistent, evidence-based verification of reported climate actions and target progress.

This guidance is designed to inform and support emerging reporting and disclosure requirements in key markets, including California and the EU. It is written to deliver the full suite of information that companies will need to meet specific disclosure and reporting obligations through one integrated set of disclosure templates and data outputs that can be adapted to conform with emerging rules and requirements.

No. This guidance is policy neutral, meaning it focuses on how to account for the impact of mitigation actions—not what should or should not count toward a specific target. It does not make judgment calls about which actions “qualify” for a target. Instead, it provides a broad, consistent framework for measuring all types of GHG-related actions. Companies can then apply the relevant sections based on their own target-setting approach or policy context.

Yes. While the guidance does not expand what companies can formally claim toward achieving specific targets, it enables credible accounting and reporting for a much wider range of climate actions—including those beyond a company’s value chain that are critical to global decarbonization. It also offers clearer methods for reporting actions taken within corporate value chains, allowing companies to more fully reflect the scope and impact of their climate strategies.

By enhancing transparency, consistency, and third-party assurability, the guidance gives companies greater confidence to pursue and disclose actions they may have previously overlooked or been unable to account for and report. 

The Task Force for Corporate Action Transparency (TCAT) is a group of GHG accounting experts, practitioners, and nonprofit organizations, working to build a stronger foundation for high-integrity climate action. Our goal is simple but critical: to help companies take meaningful action and create lasting impact by addressing gaps in guidance that exist in today’s climate standards, frameworks, and targets.

The group is facilitated by a Secretariat made up of experts and is overseen by a Senior Advisory Committee.