Once you have established your carbon footprint, we encourage you to define an action plan to reduce your emissions. Whatever approach you take to set climate targets, you will need to identify and prioritize the actions that will be most effective in reducing your emissions.
The best way to prioritize impactful actions is to organize workshop(s) with the operational team(s) concerned by your most significant emission sources. We recommend organizing a workshop for each significant emission item in your carbon footprint. It is nevertheless possible to group several workshops for reasons of time.
This template can serve as a source of inspiration and workshop support. Feel free to copy or replicate it in the format of your choice.
How to prepare these workshops? 💡
For each upcoming workshop, your CSR team must draw up an exhaustive list of possible axes for reducing emissions at the emission point covered. You will then need to preselect around 10 actions to discuss during the workshop.
Here are some tips for making this action list:
Use the actions presented in your carbon footprint, while keeping a broad horizon of ideas. We recommend that you establish a basis for reflection based on the “action plan” slides of the carbon footprint and the Greenly platform, but without stopping there! You should try to list all the existing options. Remember that actions that seem unthinkable at first may turn out to be the most effective ones.
Benchmark your competitors on their emissions reduction actions, when available on their website/annual impact report. You will then need to see if these actions are applicable to your business.
Choose ideas for concrete action and avoid general concepts (such as improving process efficiency). An idea for action could, for example, be "switch from one material to another" or "change supplier". These proposals must pose concrete questions to operational teams.
Focus on the main sources of emission to choose the most relevant actions to reduce your carbon footprint. If your objective is to align wuth the Paris Agreement, you should prioritize items that represent at least 4% of your emissions.
In addition, if you wish, you can provide introductory presentation support explaining why an emissions reduction trajectory is part of your company's strategy.
How to select participants? 🙋♀️
Each workshop should ideally have between 5 to 7 participants (maximum 10) so that everyone can express themselves about each action presented.
We recommend inviting people who can bring different angles of expertise to the broadcasting position covered in the workshop. For example, a workshop on emissions from employee travel could involve employees from accounting, human resources, and the sales team (if the latter has to travel a lot).
How does the workshop take place? 💬
To begin, introduce the workshop by explaining why an emissions reduction trajectory is part of your company's strategy, and by presenting the process below to the participants.
The workshop is organized in two succinct phases which are repeated action by action. The workshop facilitator presents the action, explains how it would impact/affect the teams concerned, then follows the progress of the two phases:
1. Autonomous work
Each participant works independently. He is asked to rate the proposed action on a feasibility scale using a post-it, as on this Miro support.
Ideally, you should leave no more than a minute per action to have time to cover them all.
2. Reactions and consensus
When all participants have placed the post-it on the feasibility scale, a round table discussion takes place so that everyone explains their choice: “I think the action is feasible/not feasible for these reasons.”. Participants must react to each other's post-its so that a general discussion is created. The objective is to move towards a consensus regarding the level of feasibility of the action to place a single value on the feasibility scale of the final feasibility-impact diagram.
The group should be given 3 minutes for all participants to explain their choices.
For your part, take notes on a post-it note about the current discussion so you can remember everyone's arguments and make an informed decision. Try to always guide the conversation towards consensus, by proposing compromises, asking questions to make it easier for everyone to express their reactions, etc.
At the end of the discussions on the action, propose to the team an estimate of the difficulty of the action taking into account everyone's arguments. Place your post-it notes on the feasibility axis based on this collective estimate.
How to interpret the results of the workshop? 🧹
Once you have gone through all the actions, you can wrap up the meeting and thank everyone for their participation.
After the meeting, for your part, your objective will be to summarize the workshop by placing each action on the final feasibility-impact diagram. To do this, all you need is an estimate of the impact of each action.
Firstly, to quantify reduction actions, we recommend that you adopt a qualitative approach. To do this, you can multiply the percentage of emissions within the initial scope of the action and the expected relative reduction in these emissions indicated on the action. Depending on the result, you can then classify the emissions on an arbitrary scale, from high reduction potential to low reduction potential.
When the final action plan prioritization matrix is ready, you can finally select the actions that have the best effectiveness: which are either high impact and high difficulty, or high impact and low difficulty. These are the actions that you can now present to management teams for implementation in the years to come, and that you can ask Greenly to audit to obtain a top medal!
If you would like to be supported by our experts in defining a reduction strategy, we offer support for the climate action plan:
ACTION PLAN SUPPORT
The objective of this service is to build a carbon trajectory aligned with the objectives of the Paris Agreement. To do this, there are 3 steps:
Do not hesitate to make an appointment with your account manager to find out more about this service! |