Setting a net-zero carbon road map

Establish your baseline

Any road map must begin with a comprehensive understanding of where you are starting from.

However, establishing your baseline is about more than just calculating your carbon footprint. You should also do the following:

• Identify the carbon hotspots in your organization and understand why emissions are particularly high in these areas. This may involve developing methods for measuring or calculating emissions for activities where little information currently exists.
• Analyze emissions in your supply chain, so that you can engage with the companies you rely on about playing their part.
• Understand your emissions relative to others in your sector, and of your sector relative to others.
• Estimate emissions over the coming decade if business-as-usual continues, responding only to current legislation and regulation.

This baseline information can be used to explain carbon reduction challenges and report progress, helping to engage and motivate internal and external stakeholders. Led by the executive board, the whole company and suppliers must be brought onboard to achieve success.

Develop a decarbonization plan

What are all your feasible carbon reduction options? The most immediate carbon savings can be achieved by buying energy from renewable or other zero carbon sources and cutting energy use. Some organizations will be able to generate their own renewable energy. Efficiency needs to be driven through all operational activities by using smart infrastructure to make energy-saving adjustments in real time and using maintenance and repairs as opportunities to upgrade assets: buildings, infrastructure, equipment, plant, and vehicles.

If your business operates a fleet of vehicles, you should aim to reduce the distance they travel. Providing there is a national program of electricity decarbonization, replacing gasoline and diesel vehicles with hybrid or preferably electric vehicles will bring down that component of your footprint.

Suppliers make a significant contribution to an organization’s carbon footprint. You should work with your supply chain to reduce the embodied carbon in their products: that is, the carbon associated with manufacturing, transportation, construction, or installation and end-of-life removal, reprocessing, or disposal.

Options need to be prioritised, considering a host of criteria: social and environmental outcomes, technical feasibility, customer acceptability, regulations and incentives, technology, risks, timescale limitations, adjacent benefits/impacts and, of course, economic impacts. Multi-criteria analysis tools can help to rank different options according to these factors. Additionally, we use our social outcomes framework alongside a marginal abatement cost curve (MACC) to match the amount of carbon eliminated over the lifetime of an asset against the cost of implementation. There is a well-established correlation between carbon and cost, and a surprising number of options will save money in the long term, providing a compelling business case when it comes to talking with stakeholders.

Once the cost and benefits of each option are understood, you can develop a decarbonisation strategy and an implementation pathway, against which you can check progress each year. Some companies take a flexible approach and develop multiple pathways which deploy different options at different times. This allows them to adapt and take advantage of external changes, such as new regulations or incentives.

Develop and implement an action plan

Many organizations can get to the point of developing decarbonization pathways, but often encounter blocks to implementing them.

It’s important to come back to PAS 2080, looking at five key success factors:

1. Leadership

Vision: Describe what you want to achieve and provide the highest-level sponsorship and commitment.

Values: Embed goals in your organization’s DNA.

Policy: Deliver clear and consistent policies to support those goals.

2. Culture and communication

Behavior: Be clear what behaviors are wanted and reward them.

Communication: Share knowledge effectively within your organization, your supply chain, the wider industry, and citizens.

Skills: Develop skills through training at all levels within your organization and within key parts of your supply chain.

3. Metrics and governance

Baseline: Establish your starting point and measure performance against it.

Targets: Set stretch goals and strive to beat them.

Tools: Give tools to those that need them.

Visibility: Shine a light on performance, understanding and explaining successes and failures alike.

Governance: Build control into the delivery process.

4. Innovation and standards

Innovation: Demand, enable, incentivize, and reward innovation across your supply chain.

Standards: Enable existing standards and specifications to be challenged, and set new standards for best practice.

5. Commercial solutions

Procurement: Embed your goals in contractual solutions.

Reward: Align supply chain objectives with your goals, provide long-term incentives, and share risks and rewards equitably.

Integration: Remove blocks in your supply chain.