Set up a FLAG project and create your first land

The GHG Protocol’s Land Sector and Removals Guidance — known informally as FLAG (Forest, Land, and Agriculture) — gives organizations with agricultural or land-based operations a standard way to account for emissions and removals from land use, land-use change, and farming activity. Dcycle supports FLAG as a project type, with its own way of entering and categorizing data.

Turn on FLAG for a project

FLAG is a setting on an existing carbon footprint project, not a separate module. Open any carbon footprint project, go to its settings, and set the project type to FLAG. Save to apply the change.

What changes: Land management

Once a project is set to FLAG, its Categories view reorganizes. A new card appears — Land management — and it absorbs the Facilities and Vehicles cards, which normally sit at the top level of Categories. In a FLAG project, facility and vehicle data is entered from inside Land management instead.

Click the info icon on the Land card to see exactly which fields are required, how emissions are calculated, and which emission factor sources apply. The methodology closely follows Spain’s official carbon footprint calculator (the MITECO calculator).

Create a land

A land (“tierra”) is a parcel or estate where an agricultural operation takes place. To create one:

1. Give it a name.
2. Set its location.
3. Set its ownership — own land, or a supplier’s land.

Ownership is the most important field on this form: it determines both how the land’s emissions are calculated and how they’re categorized in your reports.

If you choose supplier land, select which supplier it belongs to. If the supplier isn’t in the dropdown yet, type its name to add it as a new option.

Next steps

This is the first guide in a short series on FLAG in Dcycle. The next guide covers adding crops to a land and calculating the emissions from their inputs; a third covers facility and vehicle emissions inside Land management.