Many Australian organisations are aiming high with their goals for greenhouse gas emissions reduction. What happens when their targets turn out to be unrealistic – and how can they get back on track?
The past few decades have seen alarming changes in global climate patterns. Carbon emissions around the world continued to rise, reaching 37.79 billion t in 2023, and are yet to peak. The 10 years from 2015 to 2024 are the 10 warmest on record. Global surface temperatures during the 2010s were 1.1 degrees Celsius higher than during the second half of the 19th century.
But while the data has made very clear the gravity of the Earth’s climate crisis, the 2010s and early 2020s saw many private companies and government entities around the world committing themselves to decarbonisation goals that could mitigate the problem.
Drawing from the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, many organisations committed to net-zero emissions targets by 2050, with some adopting even more ambitious targets.
Perhaps too ambitious.
The danger in overconfidence
“In the early 2010s and 2020s, organisations, driven by overconfidence, set bold decarbonisation targets without fully understanding the technological, policy and financial complexities involved,” said Ken Lunty, Technical Director for Sustainability at Arcadis Australia Pacific.
“As they’ve got closer to their target deadlines, these organisations have started to realise that they’re not on the trajectory that they thought they’d be on. Some organisations haven’t even started collecting data.”
Lunty describes the realisation as a “valley of despair”, and warns afflicted organisations face reputational risk, policy paralysis and a temptation to engage in greenwashing.
“I don’t think there’s any shame in setting an ambitious target and then realising that it was too ambitious; in many cases, that’s part of the process,” he said.
“What would be a shame is if an organisation pretends that everything is fine even though they’re not meeting that target. They needed that ambition to set commitments, but now, to achieve realistic goals and continue their emissions reduction journey, they need evidence, transparency and the courage to learn from their failures.”
One size doesn’t fit all
Lunty has worked in the sustainability sector for 20 years, and over that time, he’s noticed that broadly disparate organisations often adopt unusually similar emissions targets. A 30 per cent reduction on a 2000 baseline, for instance, was popular for a while, or pursuing net-zero emissions by 2050 or even 2030.
“When a state government or federal government or a leading organisation sets that target, others follow, thinking it’s relatively achievable,” he said.
“But when you compare, say, Tasmania with Western Australia or Queensland, you’re looking at very different economies with very different outputs and very different energy mixes. For them to try to achieve a similar, if not the same, target oversimplifies their individual situations.
“That happens across organisations in the private sector as well. Kudos to the organisations that are on track and achieving their goals, but if you are dependent on fuel or purchasing a lot of goods and services, you really have to consider what your net-zero boundary actually is and if you have the means of achieving that.”
Organisations might find themselves encountering challenges around transparency and whether they’re really achieving the evidence-based decarbonisation that they claim.
“Can you influence your entire supply chain so that you are actually reaching net zero?” asked Lunty.
“Or do you have to rely on offsets, which can be a fraught process and potentially quite expensive?”
Businesses in different sectors will discover different obstacles along their decarbonisation pathway, Lunty said, and often a problem will creep up gradually.
“For example, in the airline industry, quite a few organisations have started to roll back their targets primarily because the technology that they were expecting to become affordable – sustainable aviation fuel – is still not there yet,” he said.
Getting back on track
When an organisation recognises that its targets might be too ambitious, Lunty urges them not to panic and instead find sustainable business strategies to achieve their climate change mitigation goals.
First, the organisation should seek to understand its situation, gathering data to make sure its measurement of its carbon footprint is accurate and robust. Then, it should consider whether a particular target is realistically achievable, in much the same way as it might consider the plausibility of the projections in its financial budget.
“Is the technology progressing quickly enough to help you achieve net zero?” Lunty asked.
“In Australia, for example, there’s a big push on electrification because we’re going through an energy transition from coal-based power sources to renewable-based sources. If you can electrify your assets, you’re moving from a high-carbon output to a lower carbon output.
“But that’s very dependent on how quickly the grid can shift to renewable energy sources. If that shift slows down for whatever reason – if there’s a change in government policy or other economic factors – you might find you’ve put all your eggs in one basket.”
Lunty’s process can be seen in work that Arcadis did with an organisation in the water utilities sector.
“They had set a target that was a nominal 30 or 40 per cent reduction, but they had no idea what their carbon footprint looked like,” he said.
“The first part of that project was to understand what data they had and, interestingly, there wasn’t that much data. It meant we had to go back to the start of their emissions journey and help them to reset their targets.”
The next step involved monitoring and review: iteratively checking how the organisation was tracking its new target and then making adjustments based on how the business evolved.
“With all the new materials, technology and grid decarbonisation, being on top of what innovations are available and what processes are happening represents a big opportunity,” Lundy said.
To discover more about how Australian organisations can optimise their decarbonisation strategies, register for Arcadis’s Engineers Australia Thought Leadership round table, Climate resilience is good design.
