How do you show carbon leadership to stakeholders?

Be specific about your goals and look into the areas that can use the most improvement when doing so. That way you can make your goals achievable and also create the biggest impact with a focus on double materiality.

- Carbon leadership, I believe, is a subset of climate assessment and ESG reporting - A strong foundation for carbon leadership would be strong governance and the awareness of the need for carbon reduction across the hierarchy from top to bottom. - Once governance, including a sustainability committee, is set, a baseline and carbon reduction target has to be defined. This can be done, for example using Science Based Targets initiative - The committee, baseline and target set shows the commitment that company takes towards reducing emissions

Setting lofty goals is easy, the real leaders are the ones that go in the details and have a concrete plan to achieve their targets. Here are some things to consider about goal setting: - Be clear about your goals: What do they include ? All scopes of emissions ? All business entities ? - Make them near and long term: Don't settle for 2050 goals but also set targets for every year of the journey. - Back it up with data: build a realistic decarbonisation roadmap that shows those goals are ambitious but achievable.

- Measuring and reporting your carbon footprint shows your proactiveness in taking action towards emission reduction and also increases the trust and reputation of your organisation and your stakeholders, including customers. - Some of the frameworks you can use for this endeavour is the GHG protocol, Carbon Disclosure Project, ISO standards - If you are looking to foray into a more traditional ESG reporting, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standard is the most popular, followed by SASB - If you are reporting carbon emissions specifically for climate-related disclosures, TCFD and IFRS can be used.

You can't set a target if you don't have a baseline. This is step number 1 ! Calculating your emissions on a regular basis is a crucial step to achieve your decarbonisation targets. Keep in mind that a baseline can be recalculate over time, especially as you improve your calculation methods and data quality.

For anyone focussing on Real Estate CRREM is also a great tool which shows the alignment with the Paris Agreement when it comes to carbon reduction.

- As a carbon reduction leader, it is your goal to encourage and provide solutions that will reduce and offset your organisation's carbon emissions - Consistent and accurate collection of data for Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions will help understand which department contributes to the total emissions. - Where emissions cannot be avoided, offset solutions must be used as compensation. These can be nature-based solutions or carbon capture

Here are two tips for you: - Use a marginal abatement cost curve. The name sounds complicated but it's a useful tool to rank the different reduction opportunities: renewable energy sourcing, equipment retrofit... It will show you how much you need to spend for each ton of CO2 equivalent you want to reduce. - Conduct a due diligence on carbon credits if you intend to offset. Data is increasingly available to evaluate the quality of carbon credits, this will help maximize the impact of your investment.

- Collaboration and engaging with stakeholders is critical for any carbon reduction solution or sustainability solutions - Brainstorming helps identify potentially innovative solutions that can help reduce carbon or even make the organisation resilient towards future risks, including climate change - Engagement also helps bring stakeholders awareness of what is happening within the organisation and encourage their involvement in the roadmap towards a sustainable future.

Engaging with suppliers is a key element of reducing scope 3 emissions. As the number of suppliers can easily be in thousands, consider the ones that contribute to a significant portion of your emissions or the one where there are more reduction opportunities. Investing in nature based solutions in your own value chain (insetting) is a good avenue for player in the agriculture space.

Carbon leaders push the boundaries of what is being done currently. Wether it's using new technologies, transforming their business models to include circularity or setting an internal carbon price of $100 per ton, they will set the bar high and act as role models.

The power of communication is often overlooked. A report is often created about these efforts, but also consider communicating internally. Training can be provided to the different departments so everyone is aware about their contributions. That way carbon reduction becomes a true team effort.