From Disclosure to Integrity: A Five-Lens Diagnostic of ESG Credibility and Scope 3 Accountability in Emerging Markets

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a structured framework to empirically assess Scope 3 disclosure quality, enabling comparative studies across regions and sectors.

🏢実務担当者:Offers a diagnostic tool to benchmark their own Scope 3 reporting against integrity lenses, identifying specific weaknesses in boundary coverage or supplier engagement.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need for regulatory guidance on Scope 3 assurance and supplier engagement, informing future rulemaking in emerging and developed markets.

Scope 3 emission disclosure refers to the measurement and reporting of indirect greenhouse gases generated across a company’s upstream and downstream value chain, extending beyond its operational boundaries into procurement, logistics, product use and end-of-life activities.Despite its critical role in global decarbonisation, Scope 3 accounting is complex due to fragmented supplier data, inconsistent estimation methods, exclusion of emission-intensive boundaries, and frequent reliance on generic emission factors.Existing literature and corporate reports acknowledge the challenge but fall short in offering a unified mechanism to diagnose the integrity of Scope 3 transparency, often limiting themselves to compliance-based reporting rather than supply-chain accountability.This study addresses this gap by developing a Scope 3 Integrity Framework that evaluates disclosure quality not merely as a reporting exercise but as an integrity-driven reflection of how responsibly firms internalise outsourced emissions.The framework is constructed via a structured review of GHG Protocol Scope 3, IFRS S2, CSRD and relevant literature, clustering recurring principles into five integrity lenses and indicators (boundary coverage, methodology transparency, governance accountability, supplier engagement, and assurance-based communication) that are piloted on a calibration set of listed firms using their latest sustainability reports, climate disclosures, CDP responses and assurance reports.A purposive sample of high supply-chain-intensity sectors (e.g., FMCG, retail, automotive, logistics and fashion) is assessed using publicly available sustainability reports, climate disclosures and assurance statements.Performance will be evaluated by scoring indicators across each lens, aggregating them into maturity bands to identify disclosure strength, gaps, and patterns across regions and regulatory exposure. We expect the framework to differentiate firms into measurable integrity tiers (for example between 1.4 and 2.8 on a three-point maturity scale), demonstrating its utility as a diagnostic tool for both researchers and sustainability practitioners.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6387138first seen 2026-05-05 21:55:30