Create a climate action plan

After measuring the carbon footprint of your business, you will have a baseline for setting emissions reduction targets. Your climate action plan is a practical document that outlines what you will do to achieve your targets.

How to set emissions reduction targets

One of the first things you need to do when creating an emissions reduction plan is to set some goals and targets. These targets act as stepping stones to help your organisation reach an overarching long-term goal – such as achieving carbon neutral status.

To define your targets, you could start with your ultimate goal and work backwards, or start with actions you know you can implement, and assess what else could be possible. Either way, you should look to set out targets and actions for the long, medium and short term.

Absolute vs intensity-based targets

You can measure emissions using absolute values (the total amount emitted by your organisation), or by intensity (the amount of emissions per unit – e.g. per product unit or per employee).

Ideally, your overarching emissions target should be absolute – this means that your target doesn’t grow with your business. Nonetheless, taking action to reduce the carbon ‘intensity’ of your products or processes is a useful lever for achieving absolute emissions reduction.

Science-based targets

Companies leading the way are setting science-based targets that ensure they are reducing emissions – throughout their value chain – significantly and quickly enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change. This means ensuring their carbon footprint remains in line with commitments made in the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep global warming to well below 2˚C above pre-industrial levels, and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.

EECA, the government agency that backs Gen Less, has been measuring and lowering emissions since 2008. EECA works with Toitū to produce an annual emissions reduction plan. We have two long-term, science-based targets for absolute emission levels in 2025 and 2030. Our action plan is divided into projects that step us toward our targets and improve our data quality.

As an office-based organisation with no manufacturing or freight requirements, our largest emissions area – and therefore biggest reduction opportunity – is staff travel. We’ve been chipping away at these emissions over the years by encouraging staff to reduce travel, by improving teleconferencing resources, and by embracing electric vehicle (EV) car share schemes and electric rental cars.

We also aim to run our offices as efficiently as possible, promote a low-waste working environment, and look to our supply chain for emissions reduction opportunities.

Walking the talk | EECA(external link)