You might be hearing the term ‘decarbonisation’ a lot more recently. Maybe it’s from customers asking about your environmental strategies, or from businesses promoting their decarbonisation services.
But what is decarbonisation, why is it important, and how do you build a strategy of your own?
What is decarbonisation?
Decarbonisation is the process of reducing how many greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions you release into the atmosphere by choosing low-carbon activities.
Although true decarbonisation focuses on all GHGs – from methane to nitrous oxide – efforts often focus on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, or your ‘carbon footprint’. This is because carbon dioxide (CO2) is the gas with the greatest contribution – almost 75% – to the world’s overall GHG emissions.
What is supply chain decarbonisation?
More than 90% of your carbon emissions could sit within the Scope 3 category, which includes the emissions generated by your supply chain. As such, decarbonising your supply chain represents a huge opportunity to make significant cuts in your carbon footprint.
To learn more about supply chain decarbonisation, and for practical tips on reducing your emissions, check out our guide: How to calculate supply chain emissions.
Why does decarbonisation matter?
Reducing the GHG emissions released into the atmosphere is essential to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This target, set by the Paris Agreement in 2015, is what we need to achieve to avoid the worst effects of climate change. These effects include:
- Hotter temperatures
- Rising sea levels and melting ice caps
- Extreme weather events like flash flooding or forest fires
These can lead to a range of consequences, such as biodiversity losses, poverty and displacement, and disrupted global supply chains.
As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarises, “limiting warming to 1.5°C implies reaching net zero CO2 emissions globally around 2050”. Ultimately, organisations should reduce their carbon emissions to as close to zero as possible. Some residual emissions, those that we can’t avoid generating, will need to be absorbed from the atmosphere. This can be done through offsetting schemes that take measures like planting trees.
However, offsetting isn’t enough. To achieve net zero effectively, we all need to work together to decarbonise. This means reducing how many emissions we generate, so they don’t enter the atmosphere in the first place.
What are the benefits of decarbonisation for businesses?
Helping to protect the planet is one of the biggest benefits of decarbonisation for businesses. But there are commercial benefits when you reduce carbon emissions, too.
These include:
- Staying compliant. From CSRD to SECR, multiple climate policies require businesses to communicate their climate action to stakeholders and investors.
- Keeping your customers happy. The UK Nero Zero Business Census 2024 found that 46% of respondents have received requests for carbon data from customers or tender applications. If you haven’t already been asked for yours, it may be coming!
- Becoming a more resilient business. Imagine that you start using renewable energy sources to heat your warehouses. You then become less reliant on fossil fuels, and as a result, less vulnerable to any associated market instability and price volatility.
How to decarbonise your organisation
With the energy sector producing more than three quarters of the world’s emissions, decarbonisation often relies on finding low-carbon solutions for electricity, heating, transportation, manufacturing, and the built environment.
There are many ways for businesses to embed low-carbon energy sources into their operations. For instance:
- Swap natural heating gas for renewable energy sources
- Use timers to switch off lights when they’re not in use
- Encourage employees who live close to each other to car-share
- Buy second-hand office furniture instead of new
- Invest in newer, energy-efficient machinery
- Use recycled materials when designing and constructing buildings
- Choose suppliers with shared decarbonisation goals
For more advice, check out our guide: 7 ways businesses can reduce their carbon footprint.
What is a decarbonisation strategy?
A decarbonisation strategy is your roadmap for reducing – and one day eliminating – your business’s carbon emissions. The majority of small businesses in the UK (76%) are yet to action a decarbonisation strategy, but doing so is key to making measurable emissions reductions in the long term.
Your strategy needs to include some core elements.
1. A full carbon footprint. You should begin by measuring your carbon emissions across the three categories defined by the GHG Protocol – Scopes 1, 2, and 3. This will help you understand where you’re generating the most carbon emissions, and where you need to focus your efforts.
2. Targets and deadlines for making deep cuts in your carbon emissions. To make the biggest possible impact, these should support the goals of the Paris Agreement, so that you’re contributing to global net zero targets. Following a trusted framework like the SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard will help you achieve this.
3. The decarbonisation solutions you’ll implement. These will depend on where you’ve identified the carbon hotspots across your organisation, and therefore where you’d like to make the biggest cuts.
4. How you’ll implement your decarbonisation services and solutions. Do you need to invest in new equipment, like a fleet of electric vehicles? Do you need to create new policies, like a procurement policy outlining carbon disclosure expectations from your suppliers? Don’t forget to include who is accountable for taking each of these steps and measuring their progress.
5. How you’ll track your progress against your goals. How you do this – and when – may be influenced by your business’s sustainability reporting requirements, so it’s important to understand these first.
Tips for creating a decarbonisation strategy
Here are three tips for developing and implementing an effective strategy.
1. Bring your key decision-makers into the process. This will not only make it easier to get buy-in on the decarbonisation solutions you want to introduce, but it will make sure they’re aligned with your organisation’s commercial goals.
2. Ensure accountability across your organisation. Make sure that everyone knows what their targets are, what they’ll need to do to achieve them, and how their progress will be measured.
3. Communicate your targets with your supply chain. As a customer, you can influence impactful change among your suppliers, encouraging them to start prioritising low-carbon solutions too. This will, in turn, support your carbon reduction efforts.
Achieve net zero [Free guide]
If you’re ready to start building a credible roadmap towards net zero, download our free, practical guide. In Net zero: Everything businesses need to know, you’ll learn:
- What it means to achieve net zero
- How to overcome some of the biggest obstacles
- How Planet Mark can help!
Download guide: Net Zero: Everything Businesses Need To Know
Make meaningful carbon reductions with Planet Mark
As part of our annual membership solution, the Net Zero Certification Programme, we support organisations to achieve net zero by 2050 or sooner.
To learn more, get in touch with our team.
