After COP28: Turning Net-Zero Pledges Into Operational Change

With COP28 hosted in the Emirates, a great many organisations in the region have made public commitments in a short space of time. Some are genuine and well-founded. Others were drafted quickly under pressure to have something to say.

The interesting period starts now. A target is a communications exercise until it changes a decision somebody makes on a Monday morning.

Most pledges lack an owner

The first question we ask about a net-zero commitment is who is accountable for the operational changes required to meet it. The answer is frequently sustainability, marketing, or nobody in particular.

Emissions come from procurement decisions, asset choices, logistics networks and facility management. If the people making those decisions do not have the target in their objectives, the target will not be met regardless of who is reporting on it.

Scope three is where the difficulty lives

Direct emissions and purchased energy are measurable and usually addressable. The bulk of most organisations’ footprint sits in their supply chain, where the data is held by other companies with no obligation to share it.

This is genuinely hard and it is why credible plans start with the categories they can influence and are honest about the categories they currently cannot measure.

Efficiency pays for itself; substitution does not always

There is a useful distinction between changes that reduce cost and emissions together, and changes that reduce emissions at a cost. Energy efficiency, logistics optimisation and waste reduction usually fall in the first group.

Do those first, deliberately, and use the savings to fund the second group. Programmes that begin with the expensive substitutions tend to lose support before they reach the easy wins.

Reporting will get stricter

Disclosure expectations are tightening in most markets where regional businesses have customers or investors. Assurance requirements are moving in the same direction.

Organisations that build a defensible measurement basis now will find the next few years administrative. Those relying on estimates and goodwill will find them expensive.

Start with three decisions

Rather than a programme, pick three recurring decisions where the environmental consequence is currently invisible: a procurement category, a logistics route, a capital replacement cycle. Put the emissions consequence in front of whoever makes each decision, in the same document as the cost.

That is a smaller intervention than a strategy and it changes behaviour faster. Once those three decisions look different, you have evidence for the rest, and a commitment that means something operationally rather than only in a press release.