Government entities and institutional investors are increasingly applying pressure on public
companies to address climate change. To comply with statewide and national clean energy regulations and global initiatives, and to be recognized as leaders in sustainability, more businesses are proactively measuring and reporting their greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and setting targets to reduce them.
Common reduction targets might include:
1. Absolute reduction goals (e.g., 80% reduction below 2005 levels by 2030.)
This can refer to a goal of baseline emissions being reduced by a certain percentage by a certain end year. Businesses may focus on market-based (i.e., energy efficiency and clean attribute purchases) or location-based accounting (i.e., energy efficiency or onsite renewables).
2. Science-based targets
An example of a science-based target is a well-below 2-degree Celsius target. This is based on the internationally agreed upon threshold of well-below 2-degree Celsius temperatures, representing the measure beyond which significant climatic changes would occur and be disruptive to earth’s systems that are currently relied on to meet basic societal needs. Corporate goals are vetted against the required reductions for their sector under this methodology and are encouraged to be achieved by 2050. Learn more about sector-specific goals.
Businesses that implement aggressive sustainability goals can reduce emissions and energy costs, help address climate change and attract ESG-focused customers and investors.
After you have analyzed your baseline emissions, you can click the set reduction target button to set a forward-looking date for reaching the targeted GHG emissions level from your baseline year and amount. You can specify the scope and activity you want to include for your targets.
You can either set it as an absolute value, or as an intensity target. Beyond emissions, you can also set energy goals, either savings targets or renewable goals. You can directly do scenario planning to see which personalized solutions are right for you, to meet the targets you have set.
CDP C4.2c - Provide details of your net-zero target(s).
CDP C4.1 - Did you have an emissions target that was active in the reporting year?
- CDP C4.1a - Provide details of your absolute emissions target(s) and progress made against those targets.
- CDP C4.1b - Provide details of your emissions intensity target(s) and progress made against those target(s).
Goal Setting
In this section, we will explore the goal setting feature of the Carbon Accounting Platform. It is possible to add forward-looking targets after all the data has been centralized and its corresponding greenhouse gas emissions contribution and overall carbon footprint have been measured.
Organizations can publicly state their reduction targets for sustainability goals. For example, an organization can define a 30 % reduction by 2050 or 100 % reduction by 2045. In the following screenshot, we can observe a reduction target of 33% by 2024.
To create a reduction target, you can simply click the “set reduction target” button. This will prompt you with a form to introduce the reduction details. You can choose the corresponding base emission types and base year.
Moreover, you can choose the desired scopes for the goal. In this case, the Carbon Accounting Platform will look up the corresponding emissions for the matching scopes and activities.
You can also choose the desired target, the base year, and the goal from this menu. The platform would then save this reduction target.
You could also adjust absolute targets. Editing targets is necessary in case interim targets get updated or if SBTI and other third-party frameworks create new laws or recommendations for target setting.
Targets can be set as base targets as well as target percentages in future years.
Since the Carbon Accounting Platform recalculates programmatically the baseline emissions, any future deviations or any future recalculation, such as, recalculating for the base year the reduction needed to attain future targets, can be done seamlessly in the platform by adjusting each ISL level data.
It is very important for the base year to be accurate as users can be projecting future reduction targets. The platform helps achieve this in a seamless and auditable way, compared to having presumptions that are hard to keep track of across the various years of data.