A one-page reduction plan with owners and dates

What does a carbon reduction plan look like for a small company?

One page: your target at the top, then a table of actions, each with an owner, a date, a cost, the saving in tonnes, and the funding route. Under the table, a line on how often you review it and where the footprint it is measured against is published. That is the whole plan. Customers ask for it because a target without a plan is a hope, and because the table tells them more about your business than any statement does.

What goes in the table?

Six columns, and no more than ten rows for a first plan.

The tonnes column is the one people leave blank. Fill it with an estimate from your footprint and the published factors, and label it as an estimate; a customer will take a rough saving with a source over no number at all. ClimateMate builds a ranked list of actions for a business like yours from real-world case studies and is the fastest way to a first draft of the table; the SME Climate Hub action plan does the same from a short questionnaire. Some governments publish free planning help of their own: Ireland's Climate Toolkit 4 Business builds a footprint and an action plan, and Japan's Ministry of the Environment publishes a guidebook for drafting a greenhouse gas reduction plan, in Japanese, with company examples.

Your customer will accept: a one-page plan with three to ten actions, owners and dates. They are looking for whether the actions match your footprint and whether someone is accountable, not for the length of the list.

Who should own it?

One named role for the plan as a whole, usually the managing director or whoever owns the customer relationship, and a named person for each action. Ownership is what makes a plan survive in a company without a sustainability team: the plan is a set of jobs attached to people who already have jobs, with dates, reviewed at a meeting that already happens. Put the review on the agenda of the monthly management meeting, ten minutes, and the plan stays alive without a new process.

How do I pick the actions?

From your footprint, largest line first, then by payback. The Reduce stage of this section covers the actions themselves: electricity first, then heat, efficiency, fleet, logistics and materials. For a first plan, take the three largest lines in your footprint, put one or two actions against each, and add the data actions (asking suppliers for their figures, getting the haulier's per-shipment number) because those improve next year's footprint and cost nothing. Leave the rest for the second plan.

How does the plan connect to the target?

Add up the savings column and compare it with the reduction the target needs by the target year. If the plan gets you there, say so on the page. If it falls short, say that too and name the gap; the next plan closes it. A plan that honestly shows a gap is more credible to a customer than a target with no plan, and it is what the Exponential Business Playbook describes as the transition plan: target, actions, delivery, disclosure, revised each year.

How often do I update it?

Review monthly in ten minutes (what moved, what slipped), revise once a year when the new footprint is published. Each year's plan is kept, so a customer can see the sequence: what you said you would do, what you did, what comes next. That record is worth more to a customer than any single year's figure.

Do this week: draft the table with three actions from the largest lines in your footprint, each with an owner and a date. Put a ten-minute review on next month's management meeting agenda.

What should I do next?

Taking the customer's request to your leadership team covers how to get the plan agreed and funded. If your customer uses DitchCarbon, claim your profile and record the planned actions with their dates.