In 2025, UK businesses face heightened pressures to implement robust carbon reporting frameworks. But with so many reporting frameworks, technical jargon, and evolving regulations, where do you even start?
Here are some of the most common questions we hear from businesses we work with:
This blog demystifies all these confusing questions and set out a jargon-free 8-step guide to ensure your business is on track for best practices for Net Zero target reporting in the UK.
First and foremost, you need to understand, what is the destination of ‘Net Zero’ that you are aiming for?
Put simply, Net Zero refers to achieving a balance between the greenhouse gases emitted and those removed from the atmosphere at a pace aligned to the global goal of keeping global average surface temperature increases below 1.5°C.
Carbon neutrality on the other hand, refers to achieving Net Zero carbon dioxide emissions by balancing carbon dioxide emissions with removal (often through carbon offsetting) or simply eliminating carbon dioxide emissions altogether.
Whilst carbon neutrality is a fantastic start, we should all have the plans in place to achieve Net Zero by 2050 at the latest. Carbon can be removed via several approaches such as investing in reforestation or direct carbon capture technologies.
Next, it is essential to establish a baseline year – this will be your reference point for tracking progress. Baseline data gives you a clear picture of your current emissions and what they would look like if no action is taken.
Choose a baseline year with consistent, comprehensive, and reliable data across all emission categories. This will ensure a like-for-like comparison across the years.
To navigate your way through the myriad of information and methodologies, it is key to follow a standardised reporting framework and the ‘Greenhouse Gas Protocol’ provides the world’s most widely used and trusted reporting standard for organisations. Following their framework ensures that your reporting constitutes a true and fair representation of your company’s Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and demonstrates your commitments to sustainability, thus strengthening your organisations brand.
Your reporting is only as accurate as the data you feed into it, so ensuring you have a standardised and trustworthy approach is imperative. By creating a structured data management plan, outlining how data will be collected, within what timelines and by whom, will avoid the last-minute scramble across the business to find data. It will also ensure you have a foundation on which to make incremental improvements to your data quality. Through having a centralised and documented approach, you will enhance your transparency and therefore build credibility with your stakeholders.
Alongside a structured data collection process, it is key to utilise data from a wide range of sources to gain a holistic view of your emissions, and to ensure you obtain your data from verified sources. The GHG Protocol recommends that companies should favour sources that are ‘internationally recognised, provided by national governments or peer-reviewed’.
GHG reporting is an incremental process whereby your emissions data needs continual monitoring to look for opportunities to improve the data quality. This will include refining your data collection methods to capture more accurate and comprehensive data, for example moving away from collecting your fuel usage as expense claims and beginning to obtain as mileage travelled or litres of fuel consumed. Furthermore, you will need to conduct regular audits to identify calculation discrepancies, and you may wish to invest in Carbon Literacy Training to ensure that your staff are knowledgeable about best practices and methodologies.
Once you have a defined framework for data collection, you can begin to establish a set of Net Zero KPIs that are suitable to your business. This may include total greenhouse gas emissions, renewable energy percentages and emissions intensity – for example emissions per £ of revenue. These KPIs will allow you to track progress over time, thus allowing for objective judgement of how well you are reducing emissions and approaching net zero. What’s more, setting tangible goals can motivate your employees to engage with sustainability efforts, recognise the part they play and foster a culture of innovation and collaboration around emissions reduction.
With your KPIs established, you can now begin to set targets against these. This process of setting clear, achievable targets create accountability and drives meaningful actions, as specific teams and individuals can be tasked with the job of meeting particular reduction goals. Targets also allow you to benchmark your business against peer organisations and industry standards, to better understand how successful your progress is and which areas you need to focus your energy on to make improvements. Whilst your ultimate goal may be Net Zero by a specific year, it’s important to also set some nearer term targets, as this will create some immediate wins that will boost morale and further motivate your staff to play their part.
By now, you have established your reporting team, adhered to a standard framework, collected robust data and established your KPIs and targets, all whilst consistently driving improvements throughout the process. To ensure best practice, it is now key that you disclose your results externally, through your own annual reporting. Better still is reporting through a standardised platform such as TCFD or CDP. This voluntary disclosure not only demonstrates your commitment to the process of emissions reduction, but also fosters transparency, thus building trust with your stakeholders and as a by-product, strengthening your brands reputation.
Ready to act? Get instant access to our expert-led webinars and step-by-step guides to start your Net Zero journey today.
Whether that’s through measuring your carbon emissions, creating a Net Zero strategy, or reporting through TCFD or CDP, get started today:
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Written By Jody Jones 
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