An Action Plan is a crucial aspect of any decarbonisation strategy. It is the planned approach to decarbonisation that a company will implement to reduce or eliminate GHG emissions resulting from its operations. This plan is made in accordance with your organisation's emissions reduction targets and should reflect a pathway to achieving them.

The ultimate goal of an Action Plan is to reduce the climate impact of business activities while at the same time allowing your organisation to position itself for regulatory compliance, improve consumer perception, and lower its environment-related risks.

It is crucial that you define a decarbonisation strategy which is aligned with your organisation's overall business strategy, for example, considering factors such as growth projections, acquisitions, business lines, regulatory compliance, and target markets, to name a few.

Before starting working on your decarbonisation strategy, getting a first diagnosis of your company’s maturity in climate management is essential. For that, you can ask yourself the following questions:

The emissions impact of a business activity or product should be thought of as a combination of the activity's:

The activity level is the amount of an activity performed or the amount of a material consumed, whereas the emission factor reflects the intensity of emissions produced each time an activity is performed or a material is consumed. Therefore, the smaller the activity level and emission factor, the smaller the emissions impact.

These two drivers of emissions are simultaneously the areas which companies can tackle to reduce the carbon footprint of different business activities. As such, decarbonisation actions can be thought of as projects, programs, business decisions, and other actions that attempt to reduce the activity level or emission intensity of a business activity, resulting in emissions reductions.

Actions can include:

When your organisation doesn't directly control the source of emissions, as is the case for Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions, tackling activity levels and emission factors can be thought of as supply and demand side approaches.

On the demand side, organisations have the ability to reduce activity levels. This could be through measures such as a no-fly policy to reduce the number of short-haul flights taken for business travel or implementing energy efficiency measures like installing light switch sensors in your building to reduce electricity consumption. This can also include eliminating carbon-intensive materials, products and services from your value chain by switching to more sustainable materials and production processes or redesigning your approach to implementing your service offering.

On the supply side, whilst organisations cannot simply enact measures to reduce the emissions intensity of products and services they do not control, organisations can engage with suppliers and influence them to take emissions reduction measures, or switch suppliers to providers with a smaller emission impact and develop a sustainable procurement policy for new suppliers.

Beyond supply and demand approaches, however, there should always be a critical reflection on the sustainability of your organisation's current business model and offering. This in itself is the foundation of meaningful decarbonisation.

For organisations selling physical products, this could involve evaluating opportunities for sustainable product design, material substitutions, and circular economy business models to reduce emissions during use and end-of-life phases. Meanwhile, for service providers, options can be explored to optimise efficiency and reduce the emissions intensity of processes that constitute the end-to-end delivery of services.

There are numerous approaches to decarbonisation; however, your Action Plan should be custom to your organisation, reflecting its emissions hotspots, maturity, and resource capability to implement specific actions.

Designing an Action Plan is a process with different stages to consider. We identify five key steps:

When determining the actions your organisation will take to meet its emission reduction targets, it makes sense to focus on your emission hotspots. These are the business activities that produce the most total emissions and broadly correlate to emission categories as per the GHG protocol.

It usually makes sense to concentrate resources on tackling your emission hotspots first, as these will bring the most significant return on investment and reduce emissions quickest. You can review your emissions hotspots using the 'Measure emissions' page on the Plan A Sustainability Platform.

Select the emission categories with the highest GHG emissions in your CCF inventory. This could be inspired by the Pareto principle, where you can assume that around 80% of your GHG emissions come from about 20% of your operations, and hence the necessity to focus on that 20%.

For each category, try to understand the primary sources producing high levels of emissions and which stakeholders can address these sources. For example, try assessing:

Tagging your emissions data facilitates much more advanced analysis, by allowing you to analyse sources per product, project, or department.

There are a number of actions you can take to tackle the same area of emissions. A good place to start is by reviewing the range of example actions available in the Plan A Action Plan. Here you can review the Emission Reduction Potential (ERP) of each action based on your organisation's calculated emissions, as well as model their impact by adding the action to your Action Plan and reviewing how this impacts your emissions forecast.

Given that a catered approach is best, be sure to conduct further research for other decarbonisation actions relevant to your organisation. These can be implemented on the Plan A Action Plan as 'Custom Actions'.

When determining which actions to implement, you can start with the most simple ones before moving to more complex ones. If you are struggling to get buy-in from your organisation's leadership, one approach is to establish a pilot project with easy-to-implement quick-wins which help you to demonstrate the return on investment in decarbonisation.

Some key things to consider when choosing which actions to implement include:

To assess the feasibility and coherence with climate considerations of your action plan, you could follow the (CLIMATE-SMART) validation criteria for each decarbonisation action.

The definition and selection of reduction actions may also be accompanied by financial indicators such as a Return on Investment (ROI) calculation or a marginal abatement cost curve (MACC).

Together, MACC and ROI can help prioritise emission reduction actions based on both environmental impact and financial performance. Actions that appear on the left side of the MACC (indicating lower or negative costs) and have high ROI may be prioritised as they yield significant emission reductions at lower costs and higher returns.

However, the calculation of MACC and ROI for emission reduction actions can be challenging, especially due to the need to find monetary values associated with the potential costs and benefits obtained from the actions, as well as the fact that cheaper options available in the market are usually the more polluting ones. Hence it is possible that several emission reduction actions will have a negative ROI.

For this reason, it is important that the selection of reduction actions relies not only on financial indicators but also on all the benefits for the company and for the environment that can be achieved through reducing emissions. To read more about the return on investment in decarbonisation, see 'How to Approach Engaging your Board and Executive Team on Decarbonisation'.

Once you have selected your portfolio of actions, their implementation should be planned to ensure their success. For each decarbonisation action, you should define:

To manage your portfolio of actions, add them on the Plan A Action Plan where you can assign owners, set deadlines, and monitor their progress.