Different decarbonisation actions will have varying levels of impact on your emissions. This could depend on a number of factors, including the scale of the action or its relevance to the drivers of your organisation's emissions. The potential impact on your emissions is quantified as an action's 'Emission Reduction Potential' (ERP).

On the Plan A Sustainability Platform, Emission Reduction Potential is an estimate of how many CO2e emissions can be avoided per month by implementing a given emissions reduction action (i.e. an Action Card in the Action Plan) to its full extent across your whole organisation.
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The idea behind Emission Reduction Potentials is to give you a certain level of guidance on which Action Cards to choose when planning how to reduce your organisation’s emissions.

The Emission Reduction Potential is likely not the only criterion that will determine your decision. Another consideration might be the ease of implementation or the financial costs of a particular action. This could be determined by the behavioural and organisational changes required, budget constraints, time horizon to implement, and other factors.

Note that, as of now, the Emission Reduction Potential is the main parameter used to determine the order of Action Cards shown on the Action Plan. We are gradually adding more and more depth to the algorithm suggesting the most relevant Actions for you.

Each emissions reduction action is targeted towards a particular activity or set of activities that occur in your business. A few examples of what we define as an activity in this context are:

Plan A's decarbonisation experts research and develop applicable emissions reduction actions for each possible activity that can occur in a business. For the activities mentioned above, our experts recommend the following actions (exemplary numbers only):

Emission Reduction Potentials, therefore, take into account:

Naturally, the actions with the highest Emission Reduction Potential might be the ones you look into first. When you plan Actions with deadlines in the future, you will be able to see their forecasted impact on the facility's emissions using the Analytics page.

The foundation of the calculation is your organisation's emissions. Emission Reduction Potential estimates consider specific parts (scopes and categories) of a company’s Corporate Carbon Footprint (CCF) that can be affected by a given Action.

By using your organisation's emissions, we can provide a catered Emission Reduction Potential rather than a percentage. This, however, means that the accuracy of the Emission Reduction Potential is dependent on the accuracy of your uploaded data.

Plan A's calculation uses your organisation's most recent CCF emissions readings by taking an average of the most recent 12-month period before the current year for which there is data. We do not use the current year's data as this is often subject to change, allowing for extra stability in the presented Emission Reduction Potentials. By using a 12-month period, the calculations are able to account for seasonal fluctuations in emissions. If the most recent 12-month period for a relevant category is three years in the past, we do not consider this data relevant and will not calculate an Emission Reduction Potential for the given action.

Behind the scenes, Emission Reduction Potentials are a percentage reduction in emissions in a given category. These percentages are determined by the research of Plan A's decarbonisation experts and applied to your organisation's emissions to calculate an Emissions Reduction Potential. This is expressed in kg CO₂e/month, reflecting an action's monthly potential reduction in emissions.

Emission Reduction Potentials are also a best-case scenario in that they assume 100% adoption across the organisation, which may only sometimes be possible in practice. In this regard, planning a portfolio of emissions reduction actions with a collective Emissions Reduction Potential greater than what is required to meet your reduction targets is recommended. This will allow you to pre-empt a less than 100% adoption of your actions.

Currently, actions apply to your whole organisation rather than particular facilities. This means that the calculated emissions that we consider represent all facilities, and the Emission Reduction Potential calculated reflects 100% adoption of actions across all facilities.

Our carbon accounting experts are constantly updating the methodology behind this calculation to increase its accuracy.

To summarise the key facts about the Emission Reduction Potential:

If you have any more questions on the Emission Reduction Potential and how to interpret it, feel free to reach out to us.