Whether your business is currently required to track and report on your carbon emissions or not, incorporating sustainability goals into your business plan and overarching objectives is something that every company, whatever the size or sector, should be considering.
There are many reasons why reducing your carbon emissions can benefit the business, but for many companies, and their increasingly discerning customers, lowering emissions is just the beginning.
In this blog, we look at the difference between a business being carbon neutral vs carbon negative and how you can set sustainability goals for your organisation that reflect your values and help you meet your targets quicker.
So let’s start with the terminology!
What is the difference between being carbon neutral and carbon negative?
Despite sometimes being confused with each other, carbon neutral and carbon negative actually mean very different things.
In simple terms, if a business is considered carbon neutral, this means that it is counteracting the amount of carbon emissions that it generates through its operations by paying for an equivalent amount of carbon emissions not to be produced or or to be removed from the atmosphere, elsewhere.
Carbon negative, on the other hand, is about going much further than simply trying to be carbon neutralInstead of matching the carbon emissions of a business with equivalent offsetting activities, if you’re carbon negative, it means that you actually take away more carbon dioxide or CO2e than your business produces.
Essentially, if your business is aiming to be carbon negative, it’s pledging to not only ‘leave no trace’ in terms of emissions, but to actually leave the environment better off as a result of the company and its impact.
This can be achieved through a combination of reducing waste, lowering energy use, choosing suppliers and partners with low, net-zero or carbon negative footprints and through offsetting activities.
Which is a better goal for your business: Carbon neutral vs carbon negative?
While aiming for carbon negativity might be a long-term business sustainability goal, for many businesses, achieving carbon neutrality first is a more achievable target, especially in the short to medium term.
Getting to a point where your business is carbon neutral is fantastic progress and gives you great foundations on which to build for an even more sustainable future.
Tips for setting business sustainability goals
Every business is unique, so it’s important that your sustainability goals are tailored to your own ethos, values, your brand identity and tie in with your wider business strategy to help ensure you stand the best chance of achieving them.
Following these tips can help you to set ambitious, but achievable, sustainability targets for your business.
Know your starting point
Understanding where you stand before you set new sustainability goals is essential. It not only provides a benchmark to track and compare future performance against, understanding the areas in which your business is currently generating the most carbon emissions will help to shape your sustainability strategy for the future.
You can use our free carbon footprint estimator to help you get started.
Make your goals challenging
Challenging doesn’t mean unrealistic. When it comes to setting sustainability goals for your business, being ambitious is important because it introduces a sense of urgency and can drive inspiration and innovation for businesses to think creatively about how to achieve their targets.
However, breaking ambitious goals down into smaller targets along the way can help you to:
- See results quicker, which provides something tangible as motivation to continue and expand on what you’re already doing
- Be more strategic about your sustainability goals, able to track progress accurately and regularly to ensure that you’re on the right path to your wider goals.
Align your goals to core business activities
Your sustainability targets should be directly linked to your core business operations to have the biggest impact. Depending on what your business does, this will look different for various sectors, but closely connecting sustainability to your main activities will be key to success.
In retail, for example, this could involve implementing a sustainability integration within your online store, to plant trees for every ecommerce purchase a customer makes. You can also ensure that your distribution and delivery services offset the carbon involved in getting your products to your customers.
Set short, mid-term and long-term goals
Having sustainability goals that you can reach in a couple of years is great for motivating those within the business, but what comes next? Making medium and longer-term goals a part of your strategy (the next 10-30 years) gives you something bigger to aim for and helps keep your smaller targets on track as they will all feed into achieving the larger aims.
You may have a short to medium-term goal to make your business carbon neutral and then a long-term goal to be carbon negative or reach net-zero.
Track and measure results regularly
Setting out what you need to measure to quantify success when it comes to sustainability goals is a vital part of your process. Getting a range of employees involved in both collecting the data and in communicating progress (internally and externally) can be a great way of keeping your workforce engaged and invested in what you’re trying to achieve too. Getting regular feedback from them will also help you to find and deal with any blockers or challenges to sustainability success along the way. With buy-in from not only business stakeholders, but also staff across the wider organisation, you are giving yourself the best chance of meeting or even exceeding your goals.
At Switch2Zero, we’re here to help your business make the transition for a more positive and sustainable future. We can help you make an impact quickly and affordably, and will provide resources and assets to help you engage your team and customers in your sustainability journey.
Sign up for free to get started.
