Last updated: June 9, 2026. By Will Tygart, author of the Commercial Restoration Carbon Protocol and a filed public commenter in CARB’s SB 253 Scope 3 rulemaking. This page is the property-manager edition of the Restoration Carbon Protocol knowledge base, where the full framework is published.
The Commercial Restoration Carbon Protocol (CRCP) is a free, open data standard that lets property and facility managers collect job-level Scope 3 carbon data from restoration and specialty trade contractors — one compact record per job, about a dozen fields, each mapped to a GHG Protocol category and a named emission factor. It exists because the most carbon-intensive work a building ever hosts — water-damage drying, fire remediation, mold abatement, emergency mechanical replacement — is currently invisible in almost every corporate carbon ledger, and the disclosure rules that make that invisibility a problem are already on the calendar.
Disambiguation: CRCP, the Commercial Restoration Carbon Protocol, is not the Chicago Region Carbon Program (an urban-forestry carbon-credit program that shares the acronym), and not the EU’s Carbon Removal Certification Framework (CRCF). On this site, CRCP always means the contractor carbon data standard described below.
The problem: reactive work falls through the carbon cracks
Most Scope 3 programs handle recurring suppliers reasonably well. The contracted janitorial firm, the standing HVAC maintenance provider, and the annual landscaping vendor produce predictable spend and repeatable data requests. The gap is the specialty trades that enter a building reactively: the water-damage crew after the burst pipe, the smoke remediation team after the kitchen fire, the abatement contractor, the emergency crew swapping a failed compressor at 2 a.m.
These engagements share three traits that defeat normal carbon accounting:
- They are procured under duress — often through an insurance carrier or third-party administrator rather than the building’s normal sourcing channel, with vendors selected for speed and certification, not reporting maturity.
- They are carbon-dense — generators, heavy drying equipment running for days, demolition, hauling, and large volumes of disposed and replaced material.
- Nobody is assigned to count them. The engagement ends, the invoice is paid, and the carbon goes unrecorded. The one published estimate in the field, from UK insurer Aviva, found that restoring a single flooded home produces CO2 roughly equal to six and a half return transatlantic flights. Commercial losses run larger.
The same invisibility extends to capital work: replacing a chiller, re-roofing, modernizing an elevator. Under the GHG Protocol, this activity lands in Scope 3 Category 1 (Purchased Goods & Services), Category 2 (Capital Goods), and Category 5 (Waste Generated in Operations). California’s SB 253 phase-in concepts place Categories 1 and 5 in the first Scope 3 wave — precisely where restoration and trade activity concentrates.
Whose problem is it? The owner/occupier split
The single most useful distinction in contractor carbon — and the one most reporting teams get wrong — is which side of the lease the obligation sits on.
| Property owner / PM firm (the BOMA seat) | Corporate occupier / FM team (the IFMA seat) | |
|---|---|---|
| Reports to | GRESB, ENERGY STAR, local building performance standards (in NYC: LL84 benchmarking, LL97 caps) | GHG Protocol corporate inventory, California SB 253, EU CSRD |
| The question asked | How energy-intensive is the asset? What is its operational and embodied carbon? | What emissions did our organization’s operations cause — including the contractors we hired? |
| Where the restoration job lands | Evidence for GRESB supplier-monitoring indicators; capital-planning data; LL97 disaster-mitigation documentation | A Scope 3 Category 1 line item in the occupier’s own inventory |
When a restoration crew dries out a corporate occupier’s flooded office, those emissions are the occupier’s Category 1 line item, regardless of who holds title to the building. It is not the landlord’s Scope 3. But the property manager is the person who knows when the crew showed up, what they did, and what left the building on a truck — which is why CRCP is built around the manager’s intake, not the contractor’s goodwill.
What LL97 does and does not cover (read this before anyone oversells you)
NYC’s Local Law 97 caps emissions from operating a covered building — on-premises fuel combustion plus purchased electricity and steam, multiplied by fixed coefficients. Contractor operations, hauling, debris disposal, and the embodied carbon of replacement materials are outside LL97’s caps entirely. No law requires your restoration vendor’s carbon data today, and any pitch claiming otherwise is wrong.
So why collect it? Three reasons, in ascending order of immediacy:
- The disclosure regimes that DO reach vendor carbon are dated and phased: SB 253 Scope 1/2 reporting begins in 2026 with Scope 3 following in 2027, CSRD already pulls value-chain emissions into scope for thousands of undertakings, and the GHG Protocol’s ongoing Scope 3 revision prioritizes supplier-specific data over spend-based averages.
- GRESB scores whether real estate entities monitor their service providers’ ESG compliance — contractor carbon data is exactly the evidence that indicator wants, and tenant/investor questionnaires increasingly ask for it by name.
- LL97 itself rewards the documentation habit: under 1 RCNY 103-14(i)(1), disaster damage documented with photographs and a narrative can reduce a building’s LL97 penalty to zero for that year — and the contractor’s job file is precisely that documentation. The crew that dried your building is also generating your penalty-mitigation evidence.
The CRCP job record: about a dozen fields, captured at the job
CRCP’s core artifact is a one-page-per-job record in which every field is mapped to its GHG Protocol category and a named emission factor, and every value is flagged as primary data or a proxy so a reporting team can see data quality at a glance.
| # | Field | GHG Protocol mapping |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vehicle log (crew trips, hauling mileage) | Category 4 (Transportation) |
| 2 | Waste transport | Category 4 |
| 3 | Equipment power and generator runtime, with fuel type | Categories 1 / 4 |
| 4 | Chemicals and consumables | Category 1 |
| 5 | PPE | Category 1 |
| 6 | Containment materials | Category 1 |
| 7 | Debris volume by waste stream | Category 5 (Waste) |
| 8 | Disposal method and receiving facility | Category 5 |
| 9 | Demolished materials | Category 12 / 5 |
| 10 | Replacement materials installed | Category 1 (Category 2 when capital equipment) |
| 11 | Job classification (water / fire / mold / abatement / biohazard) | context |
| 12 | Job timeline and duration | context |
The record is published as a machine-readable JSON Schema (RCP-JCR-1.0) with named emission-factor sources — the EPA 2025 Emission Factors Hub, EPA eGRID, EPA WARM, DEFRA 2024, and IPCC AR6 — so the output drops into ESG platforms without re-keying. The full technical framework, schema, and worked examples live in the RCP knowledge base on tygartmedia.com; a property-manager-ready job carbon report template is free.
How a property manager puts CRCP to work: three moves
- Attach a contractor emissions checklist to every reactive engagement and capital project. At minimum: equipment and generator runtime with fuel type; vehicle trips and mileage; debris volume by waste stream with disposal facility; demolished versus replacement material quantities; job classification and duration — each item tagged primary or estimated.
- Make the data contractual, not optional. One sentence in the master services agreement or vendor onboarding packet does the work: “Vendor shall provide per-job emissions data in the requesting organization’s specified format as a condition of final invoice approval.” Contractors respond to payment triggers far more reliably than to post-event questionnaires, and the same clause fits inside green-lease provisions many occupiers already negotiate.
- Decide the mapping before the emergency. Route each field to its Category 1 / 2 / 5 bucket in your (or your tenant’s) existing Scope 3 inventory, define acceptable proxies for what a vendor cannot supply, and document the factor source and vintage — the provenance discipline assurance providers now expect.
You already know this movie from the other side: getting energy data out of reluctant tenants. Vendor carbon is the same problem in reverse — and the fix is the same: standardized intake, set up before you need it, attached to something the counterparty cares about.
What this means for each seat at the table
| If you are the… | CRCP gives you… |
|---|---|
| Owner | GRESB supplier-monitoring evidence, LL97 disaster-mitigation documentation, and a capital-projects carbon trail (chillers, roofs, elevators) before lenders and investors ask for one. |
| Facility / property manager | A one-page intake that makes you the person who solved contractor Scope 3 — applied uniformly to the plumber, the restoration crew, and the capital-project team alike, from the one seat where every trade is authorized, scoped, and signed off. |
| Tenant (corporate occupier) | The Category 1 and Category 5 line items your SB 253 / CSRD / GHG Protocol inventory is currently estimating away with spend-based proxies — as primary, job-level data your auditors can trace. |
Why the window is now
The first SB 253 deadlines arrive in 2026 and Scope 3 follows in 2027; CSRD already reaches the value chains of European-exposed multinationals; and the GHG Protocol revision is closing the spend-based escape hatch — a restoration contractor is the textbook diversified supplier whose smoke job and Category 3 water loss produce radically different emissions for similar invoice totals, which is exactly the variance averages bury. Reactive vendors do not become easier to capture after the deadline. They become easier only when the intake is built before the next loss. The property managers who treat contractor emissions as a standing data requirement — not an emergency afterthought — will be the ones whose inventories survive an audit, and the ones who define what good contractor data looks like for everyone else.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Commercial Restoration Carbon Protocol (CRCP)?
CRCP is a free, open data standard for collecting job-level Scope 3 carbon data from restoration and specialty trade contractors: a roughly twelve-field record per job, each field mapped to a GHG Protocol category and named emission factor, flagged primary-or-proxy. It is the commercial, property-manager-facing application of the Restoration Carbon Protocol (RCP).
Is CRCP required by law?
No. No statute requires contractor carbon data today — NYC’s LL97 explicitly covers only building operating emissions. CRCP is voluntary infrastructure for the disclosure regimes that do reach vendor carbon: California SB 253 (Scope 3 from 2027), the EU CSRD, GRESB scoring, and corporate GHG Protocol inventories.
What is the difference between RCP and CRCP?
RCP (Restoration Carbon Protocol) is the contractor-side standard: how a restoration firm captures and reports per-job emissions data. CRCP is the demand side: how a commercial property or facility manager specifies, contracts for, and ingests that data. Same record, two ends of the handshake. The canonical framework is published at tygartmedia.com/rcp.
Is CRCP the Chicago Region Carbon Program?
No. The Chicago Region Carbon Program is an unrelated urban-forestry carbon-credit program that shares the acronym. The Commercial Restoration Carbon Protocol is a contractor emissions data standard for the built environment.
Does my restoration contractor’s carbon count toward Local Law 97?
No. LL97 counts only emissions from operating the building — on-site fuel combustion plus purchased electricity and steam. Contractor operations are outside the cap. But a documented loss event can zero an LL97 penalty under the disaster-mitigation rule, and the contractor’s job file is that documentation.
What does it cost a contractor to report under CRCP?
Nothing in licensing — the standard is open. The data points are things crews already know (runtime, loads hauled, dumpster counts, materials replaced); the work is writing them down in one structure instead of none.
How do I start collecting CRCP data from my vendors?
Add the per-job data requirement to your MSA or onboarding packet (“…as a condition of final invoice approval”), hand vendors the job carbon report template, and decide internally which GHG category each field feeds. Start with your restoration vendor — it is the highest-carbon trade you hire and the one whose paperwork already flows through insurance documentation discipline.
Sources and further reading
- Restoration Carbon Protocol (RCP) — Complete Knowledge Base (canonical framework)
- RCP Job Carbon Report template
- GHG Protocol — Scope 3 Calculation Guidance
- NYC Local Law 97 of 2019 (statute text)
- 1 RCNY 103-14 (LL97 rule, incl. disaster mitigation)
- GRESB Real Estate Reference Guide
- Aviva: the carbon footprint of restoring a flooded home