We Can’t Verify a Black Box: What 22 Years of GHG Verification Reveals | Derek Markolf

Derek Markolf spent 22 years at LRQA leading GHG verifications across manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and nearly every other sector. Now he runs his independent verification practice while slow-traveling the world with his wife — conducting verifications remotely from wherever they happen to be living that month.

In this conversation, Derek shares what two decades of looking inside other organizations’ GHG inventories actually teaches you — the patterns that show up everywhere, the mistakes that keep getting made, and the emerging issues that practitioners need to get ahead of right now.

We cover:

→ Why the smallest sources are the biggest pain — and why this surprises first-time reporters every time

→ The “levers” problem: why spend-based and industry-average data removes your ability to show real emissions reductions

→ Base year recalculation — the most under-enforced GHG Protocol requirement, and why verifiers are giving it a lot more attention now that companies are nearing their target years

→ What inventory management plans need to contain to survive staff turnover

→ Why AI-assisted tools are creating a new challenge for verifiers: “We can’t verify a black box”

→ What separates organizations that build solid, verification-ready inventories from those that struggle — and why it almost always starts with leadership commitment.

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