10 Steps to Becoming a Carbon Neutral Business

Page 15 STEP 04: SET YOUR STRATEGY Set your strategy STEP 04 Having understood your organization’s carbon footprint, you can now define the strategy to reduce it. There are several options for meeting your carbon neutrality goal. In principle, you could “offset” your way to carbon neutrality without even reducing your organization’s own emissions. It is fast, easy and not necessarily hugely expensive (depending on the scale of your carbon footprint of course). It does not improve your business performance though, and since you will need to buy the offsets annually, you are simply adding an additional cost to your business. Some organizations may really struggle to significantly reduce their carbon footprint and will ultimately need to offset their way to carbon neutrality. For many larger businesses, however, there is real potential to combine a climate action program with operational efficiencies and cost savings. Thus, a widely recognized approach is to focus heavily on reducing your own emissions as much as possible first, switch to renewables for the energy supply and then offset the remaining emissions that cannot be avoided or addressed in other ways. With this approach, you will have these four workstreams which to some degree are sequential, but in reality work in parallel at various paces: / Greenhouse gas accounting / Internal emission reduction / Renewable electricity / Carbon offsets Reducing your own emissions for example through an energy efficiency program that lowers your electricity consumption can be a powerful way to show the direct business benefits of an ambitious sustainability program. It can also help free up funds that can be invested in renewable energy supply or carbon offsets. As with any strategy development, your approach depends on your goal or ambition, the resources you have available (see Step 1 “Define the ambition”) and your organizational culture. If you set a relatively short-term goal or have a limited budget, you may have to accept that a significant part of your emissions will be reduced by Renewable Energy Certificates and carbon offsets instead of internal reductions. However, if you have decided to include all the emissions from your value chain in your carbon neutrality pledge, your deadline is further away or your resources are sufficient – your primary focus could be on internal reductions instead. With this strategy, you could also switch to longer term renewable energy options, shifting the focus from RECs to PPAs or on-site installations.