Energy Academy
Level 1/Carbon Accounting Fundamentals
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ISO 14064, ISO 14068 & Verification

The ISO family that formalises footprints and claims: 14064's three parts, 14068 replacing PAS 2060 for carbon neutrality, and what third-party verification adds.

10 min read · Jacob Willis, Net Zero Lead · Last reviewed July 2026

The GHG Protocol tells you how to build a footprint; the ISO standards exist so that someone else can formally trust it. They specify the requirements a greenhouse-gas statement must meet, the process an independent verifier follows to check it, and, since 2023, the rules a carbon-neutrality claim must satisfy. For an energy professional the landscape is worth one clear map, because these acronyms appear in tender documents and supplier questionnaires with increasing confidence that you know them. This lesson provides the map: ISO 14064's three parts, ISO 14068 and the end of PAS 2060, verification levels, and how it all relates to the Protocol and to SBTi targets.

ISO 14064: the specification family

ISO 14064 is the international standard for greenhouse gas accounting and verification, in three parts that mirror the field's division of labour:

  • Part 1 specifies requirements for an organisation-level GHG inventory: boundaries, quantification, reporting. It is the standard a corporate footprint is prepared "in accordance with".
  • Part 2 does the same for projects: quantifying the emission reductions a specific intervention delivers against a baseline, the carbon cousin of M&V's adjusted baselines, and the foundation under offset project methodologies.
  • Part 3 specifies how verification and validation are conducted: the standard the checker works to.

The relationship with the GHG Protocol is complementary, not competitive: the Protocol supplies the detailed accounting methodology, ISO 14064 supplies the formal requirements framework, and they were deliberately aligned. The common UK pattern is to calculate following the Protocol (with UK government factors) and have the result verified against ISO 14064-3.

Verification: what the checker adds

Verification is an independent body examining an inventory and issuing an opinion, at a stated level of assurance: limited (the commoner, cheaper level: "nothing came to our attention suggesting material misstatement") or reasonable (deeper testing, stronger opinion, audit-grade effort). What buys the cost is standing: verified figures carry weight in tenders, SECR narratives and investor questionnaires that self-declared ones do not, and the verifier's questions (boundary justifications, factor sources, data trails) are exactly the five principles applied by a stranger. Organisations that kept honest audit trails find verification a formality; those that didn't find it an education.

ISO 14068: carbon neutrality after PAS 2060

For years, UK carbon-neutrality claims leaned on PAS 2060, a British specification. It has been superseded: ISO 14068-1, published in 2023, is now the international standard for carbon neutrality, and PAS 2060 was withdrawn in November 2025. The change is stricter in the way that matters: ISO 14068 requires a hierarchy in which an organisation quantifies its footprint, sets and pursues genuine reduction pathways, and only then uses high-quality offsets for the residue, with the whole claim scoped and time-bound. "We bought offsets equal to our emissions" no longer clears the bar by itself. Alongside this sits the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), which is not an accounting standard but a target-validation scheme: it certifies that an organisation's reduction targets align with climate-science pathways, taking the footprint (built to Protocol/ISO rules) as its input. The net-zero course picks up the strategy layer these standards feed.

One map: Protocol counts, 14064 specifies, 14068 rules the claim

When the acronyms fly, place each one: the GHG Protocol is the accounting methodology; ISO 14064-1 is the formal specification an inventory conforms to; ISO 14064-3 is how a verifier checks it; ISO 14068-1 governs what may be called carbon neutral (PAS 2060 is gone); SBTi validates targets rather than footprints. A tender that asks for "a verified inventory and science-based targets" has just asked for 14064-3 assurance on a Protocol-built footprint plus SBTi validation, and now you can say so.

What's next

Standards known, the final module gets practical: assembling a real footprint from energy data (the worked 200-tonne company), taming scope 3 by screening, and making claims (SECR narratives, questionnaire answers, neutrality statements) that survive exactly the scrutiny this lesson described.

Sources and further reading