Once a business has a working emissions inventory, the next question is almost always the hardest one: what should the actual carbon reduction target be? Too ambitious, and it collapses under its own weight within a year, damaging credibility with employees, investors, and customers alike. Too modest, and it invites accusations of greenwashing without ever driving meaningful change. Setting a target that is both credible and achievable is less about picking an impressive-sounding number and more about following a disciplined process.
Start From an Accurate Baseline, Not an Assumption
Every credible carbon reduction target begins with a solid carbon baseline — a specific year against which future progress will be measured. Choosing a baseline year with reasonably complete, verifiable data matters more than choosing a flattering one. A business that picks its worst year as a baseline simply to make future reductions look larger is setting itself up for scrutiny later; auditors, investors, and increasingly customers will ask how the baseline was chosen and whether it reflects normal operating conditions.
Once the baseline is set, the target itself needs a clear scope. Decide up front whether the commitment covers Scope 1 and 2 only, or extends into Scope 3 — and be explicit about it publicly. A target that quietly excludes the largest share of a company’s footprint, which for most businesses is Scope 3, will eventually be read as evasive rather than ambitious, even if that was never the intention.
Anchor the Number to a Recognised Framework
A target does not need to be validated by an external body to be useful internally, but anchoring it to a recognised framework — such as the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) — gives it a credibility that an arbitrary percentage cannot match. SBTi’s current guidance for 1.5°C-aligned near-term targets works out to roughly 4.2% annual reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions, using a recent base year. That figure is a useful reference point even for businesses that never intend to submit for formal validation: it tells you roughly what “credible” looks like, so a target of 1% a year can be recognised as too weak, and a target of 25% a year can be recognised as unrealistic without a fundamental change in operations, not just efficiency tweaks.
Intensity-based targets — emissions per unit of revenue or production, rather than an absolute number — are worth considering for businesses expecting significant growth. They allow a company to keep expanding while still demonstrating genuine decarbonisation, and they avoid the awkward outcome where a fast-growing, genuinely improving business appears to be failing an absolute target purely because it is producing more.
Build the Target Around Actions You Can Actually Name
The single biggest predictor of whether a carbon reduction target survives contact with reality is whether it was built bottom-up from specific, named actions, rather than top-down from a round number that sounded appropriately ambitious in a board meeting. Before committing publicly, a business should be able to answer: which specific measures — a switch to renewable electricity, LED retrofits, route optimisation for logistics, a supplier engagement programme — are expected to deliver which share of the reduction, and by when? If that list does not add up to the target, the target is aspiration, not a plan.
- Quick wins first. Energy efficiency measures and operational fixes typically deliver the fastest, cheapest reductions and build early momentum.
- Structural changes next. Renewable energy procurement, fleet electrification, and facility upgrades take longer to plan and fund but deliver the bulk of deeper reductions.
- Supplier engagement in parallel. If Scope 3 is in scope, reduction depends partly on suppliers’ own progress — build in realistic timelines for that engagement rather than assuming immediate cooperation.
- Interim milestones. A single distant target date (2030, 2050) is easy to defer. Interim checkpoints every one to two years keep the target honest and catch slippage early.
Leave Room for Course Correction
A realistic target also plans for the possibility that some initiatives will underdeliver. Building a small buffer into the plan — treating the named actions as needing to add up to slightly more than the headline target — protects against the common failure mode where one delayed project (a renewable power purchase agreement that takes an extra year to finalise, a supplier programme that ramps up slower than hoped) quietly derails the whole commitment. Revisiting the target annually against actual data, rather than only at the original deadline, makes it far easier to catch and correct drift while there is still time to act.
The Bottom Line
A credible carbon reduction target is not the most ambitious number a business can announce — it is the most accurate one it can actually deliver, built from a clean baseline, anchored to a recognised framework, and broken down into specific actions with named owners and dates. Businesses that follow this discipline tend to hit their targets, or come close, because the target was never a guess to begin with. Businesses that skip it tend to quietly revise or abandon their commitments a few years in, which does far more damage to credibility than a modest, well-reasoned target ever would.