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Our first goal is to help you reduce your carbon footprint by cutting the greenhouse gas emissions of your business. Why?
We need to reduce our carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 and to zero by 2050 to limit global warming to 1.5°C. This requires a massive collective effort on the part of governments, consumers and businesses. The truth is an either/or approach won't get us there, we need to both reduce and offset.
We are guided by this simple principle - reduce what you can, offset the rest.
Here are 3 great reasons for reducing what you can:
There is no doubt that offsetting is an important part of the toolkit too:
How do we know how much to reduce our footprint by? if we are going to make a meaningful contribution to reducing the impacts of climate change we need to set our reduction targets in line with the overall goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. This is called setting 'Science-based targets' for carbon reduction.
There are 3 types of target that we help you to set:
This is a commitment to reduce the total emissions, in absolute terms, of all or part of your business activity, over a defined period of time. For example you might say,
We will reduce my total footprint from 100 tonnes of CO2e to 58 tonnes of CO2e over the next 10 years.
It's best practice to set a long term absolute target for reducing the emissions of your own operations (also known as Scopes 1 & 2) as a minimum. It's also a good idea to set absolute targets for individual activities over shorter time periods to help drive action and build momentum.
This is a commitment to reduce the intensity of your carbon emissions depending on the amount of activity you are doing. This type of target can be particularly useful if your business is expecting to grow significantly over the period as it may be difficult to reduce the absolute emissions in your supply chain and customer activity. Here are some typical intensity targets:
Over the next 10 years we will reduce our supply chain emissions from 100 tCO2e per £1m of spend to 48 tCO2e per £1m of spend
Over the next 7 years we will reduce the emissions of this product line from 56 kgCO2e per product sold to 48 tCO2e per product sold
Over the next 5 years we will reduce the emissions of this factory from 1.2 tCO2e per sq metre to 1.1 tCO2e per sq metre
Sometimes it is important to set a target that you cannot put a number on. This might be an important symbolic goal, or something that will encourage your employees, customers or suppliers to get involved. Typical qualitative goals might be:
Install charging points for electric cars in the staff car park
Hold an energy saving workshop
Put up reminders to switch everything off at the weekend
One of the advantages of our detailed report is that it breaks down your footprint by category so that you get a clear picture of which activities have the biggest impact on the climate and can target your actions accordingly.
Getting your employees, customers and suppliers involved in your efforts to reduce your footprint is crucial to success, so it is also important to consider actions that will encourage this.
We help you prioritise your action plan to meet these two goals.
The right mix of targets and actions is important to make sure that you are heading in the right direction over the long term and that you start building the momentum in the short term. This will be unique for your business, but will likely include:
Learn more about the different scopes of activity
We have found that 4-6 targets at any one time is enough to give you focus and build momentum.
"If we are going to do it, we want to do it properly"
- Tim Pearce, Haines Watts Accountants