A standard prerequisite for a company or business today, regardless of their place in the global economy, is to be conscious of their carbon footprint. This carbon footprint, which is designated to all types of industries, corporations and to every single person, is essential to determine the effects of global warming.
Carbon emissions drive the global economy into larger peril if not regulated efficiently. Therefore, incorporating practices like having a corporate climate action plan is beneficial to every company for greener operations and foreseeable profitability.
Corporate Climate Action Plan: The Basics
Administrative and operative changes that are brought into effect within a company with the goal of reducing their carbon emissions as a corporation are called corporate climate action plans.
These plans are generally dictated by a larger goal of efficiently offsetting the emissions of their activities by acquiring company-wide data about their scale of energy usage, the energy spent on the products or services they sell, and the climate-related risks affected by the same.
The fundamental goal of establishing a cohesive corporate climate action plan is understanding each individual business unit and how the components can be made into more energy-efficient versions of themselves. The cost of making these changes is a factor that has to be considered as well, and to make these company-wide changes, some basic steps need to be undertaken, such as:
- Identifying the carbon consumption centres, or the plan ‘targets’
- Understanding how the target can fit into environmental management activities
- How Internal Carbon Pricing and Carbon Offsets factor into the corporate climate action plan
- Innovating on rectifying energy consumption and moving towards cleaner and greener practices (covers all necessary research and development)
It is a foremost step towards moving into a more sustainable direction for most companies, be it on an industrial scale or an infrastructural scale. A corporate climate action plan can be instrumental in establishing the company as an innovative space that can push towards greener industrial and operative practices. Since necessity breeds invention, having a strong corporate climate action plan pushes a company to strive for energy-efficient practices that are designed to fulfil company goals with little environmental impact.
An added benefit of the same is how a company may ultimately benefit from investing in all solutions forwarded by a corporate climate action plan, as data has shown they are monetarily profitable in most cases.
Why is a Corporate Climate Action Plan Necessary?
As of 2019, companies and industries are responsible for roughly 36.7 billion metric tons of CO2 being released into the earth’s atmosphere. This is detrimental to the need of the hour, which is reducing industrial carbon footprints.
Climate change caused by global warming has been dictated to become irreversible once the threshold crosses the safe margin of 2 degrees. Small scale lifestyle changes adopted by people help, but practices by larger industries and businesses that consume non-renewable energy in the form of electricity for their operations add on a much larger scale to CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
A corporate climate action plan, therefore, is a comprehensive strategy to minimise emissions from all types of companies and businesses. It can encompass all initiatives and strategies aimed at lowering indirect and direct greenhouse gas emissions generated by a city as a result of commercial operations. These plans are essential to the need of the hour: abating greenhouse gas emissions from reaching a dangerous level.
Therefore, companies should adopt smarter and greener operative solutions within their corporate and industrial structure to bring about innovative changes for the next generations to come. They should also partner with trusted energy and electrical service providers that can help them gather data and centralize their operations for smarter energy consumption as a whole.