Carbon reduction is hard: how we decoupled our emissions from our growth

Lots of businesses have signed up to Science Based Targets (SBTs) to give them a north star for their net zero and carbon reduction plans. As well as giving a robust organisational target to work towards, getting validated is a clear and public statement of intent that everyone recognises and understands. The 12,000 organisations that are currently validated can’t be wrong!

We are no different at Action Sustainability. As a sustainability consultancy, we need to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.

Being honest, getting a validated target is no easy task. Lots of criteria, lots of data, lots of checking. Saying it is labyrinthine is an understatement. Despite this, the herculean achievement of getting validated is not the end; it is only the end of the beginning. Now the real work starts. And hot on the heels of getting validated, our experience shows that there is an inevitable follow-on question that belies a concern: “we’re getting validated, but what happens when our business grows and our carbon emissions go up? How will we hit our target?!”

Our own numbers: growing without growing our footprint at the same rate

Again, we are no different. In 2021 we got validated to SBTi against a 2019 emissions baseline. We emitted 115 tonnes CO₂e across all three scopes. For context, we had 22 employees at this point, very much a small business. Being an advisory business, our emissions are overwhelmingly in Scope 3 due to travel: staff commuting and home working, business travel, and delegates attending our events.

Things have changed since then. The world leant even more into digital communication out of the back of COVID-19, and we tripled our employee base to 61 in 2025: we have become a solid medium-sized business. Across the same time, our revenue has grown by 150%, and our GHG emissions have risen too. Naturally, the same question occurred to us: how do we lower our emissions while we grow, and in an area we have little control over?

However, and this is where it gets interesting, our emissions haven’t grown at the same pace as our revenue or our headcount. In 2025 they topped out at 143 tonnes CO₂e, 24% higher than our baseline. An increase, certainly, but nowhere near the 150 to 200% increase in turnover and employees.

This translates to carbon efficiency improving by a factor of two: we emitted 5.3 tCO₂e per FTE in 2019, which has reduced to 2.4 tCO₂e in 2025. Likewise, carbon per £m turnover has dropped from 55.4 tCO₂e in 2019 to 27.5 tCO₂e in 2025.

In other words, we have successfully decoupled revenue and emissions. Something we are proud of and will continue to pursue.

So how do we keep reducing?

This is all great of course, decoupling and greater efficiency, but how do we keep reducing our emissions? After all, net zero is all about reducing absolute emissions, not relative emissions.

There are two main aspects we can consider. The world is gradually decarbonising, despite what some actors might do or say: electricity grids are increasingly sourcing their power from renewable generation, surface transport, big and small, is moving to EV, and housing stock is slowly becoming more energy and carbon efficient.

In parallel, we as a business can take action. We can reduce the amount of business travel we do and use more of the online meeting applications that have become part of day-to-day life. We can encourage delegates coming to our in-person events to use more public transport, supported by us choosing locations with good links. And we can support colleagues with their ambitions to improve the energy and carbon efficiency of their homes.