Few climate disclosure rules have had a more turbulent path than the US Securities and Exchange Commission's climate-related disclosure rule — and Scope 3 has been at the center of that turbulence from the start.
How we got here
The SEC first proposed its climate disclosure rule in 2022, and the initial draft included a Scope 3 reporting requirement for companies where Scope 3 emissions were material or where the company had set a public emissions-reduction target that included Scope 3. That proposal drew heavy comment — and heavy pushback — from industry groups concerned about the reliability, cost, and litigation exposure of reporting emissions data largely outside a company's direct control.
When the SEC adopted a final rule in March 2024, the Scope 3 requirement had been dropped entirely. The final rule retained Scope 1 and Scope 2 disclosure requirements (phased by filer size, and only where material), along with climate-related risk, governance, and financial-statement-effect disclosures — but no company is required to disclose Scope 3 emissions under the SEC's rule as adopted.
The rule was then immediately challenged in court by multiple parties from different directions — some arguing the SEC exceeded its authority, others arguing the final rule didn't go far enough. The SEC voluntarily stayed implementation pending the litigation, and the rule's ultimate fate — including whether it survives in anything like its adopted form — has remained genuinely uncertain since.
Why "no federal Scope 3 requirement" doesn't mean "no Scope 3 pressure"
For any US-listed or US-operating company, treating the SEC rule's uncertain status as a reason to deprioritize Scope 3 measurement misreads where the actual pressure is coming from. Several other forces apply regardless of what happens to the SEC rule:
- California's climate disclosure laws (SB 253 and SB 261) apply to large companies doing business in California — a bar many multinationals clear regardless of where they're headquartered — and SB 253 includes a Scope 3 emissions disclosure requirement with third-party assurance phased in over time, independent of federal rulemaking.
- EU CSRD exposure can apply to US companies with a large enough EU subsidiary presence, carrying its own Scope 3 requirement regardless of US federal rules.
- Customer-driven disclosure — large buyers running their own Scope 3 supplier assessments — doesn't wait for a regulator. A supplier who can't produce credible emissions data is increasingly at a competitive disadvantage in RFPs, independent of any legal mandate.
- Investor expectations haven't reversed even where regulation has stalled. Institutional investors and ratings providers that use Scope 3 data in capital allocation and engagement decisions continue to request it directly, rule or no rule.
The practical takeaway
Companies that paused Scope 3 measurement work waiting for regulatory certainty from the SEC have generally found themselves scrambling when a different requirement — California's laws, a CSRD trigger, or a major customer's supplier questionnaire — arrived first, on a timeline they didn't control. The more durable approach is to build the underlying GHG Protocol-aligned Scope 3 inventory once, on its own timeline, and treat each individual disclosure regime as a different output format for the same underlying data — rather than waiting to see which regulator moves first.