Roadmap for Corporate Decarbonization

A decarbonization roadmap is an operational document that answers a specific question: Given this company’s emissions profile, what measures should be implemented, in what order, with what investment, and toward what target?

What Is a Decarbonization Roadmap?

A decarbonization roadmap identifies a company’s most significant sources of emissions, evaluates the available measures to reduce them, ranks them by cost and impact, and maps them out in a timeline that includes responsible parties, a budget, and monitoring indicators.

Its primary audience is the management team responsible for deciding how to allocate the CapEx budget for the next three years.

Difference from the Climate Transition Plan

A transition plan is the strategic document that integrates the roadmap into a broader framework: scenario analysis, governance, commitments to the value chain, financing structure, and external communication with investors and regulators.

The roadmap is the operational layer of that plan. It addresses the “how.” The transition plan addresses the “why” and the “where,” and places the roadmap within a narrative of business model transformation. One without the other is incomplete: a roadmap without a transition plan is execution without strategy; a transition plan without a roadmap is strategy without execution.

Difference from the emissions inventory

The emissions inventory is the diagnosis: how much the company emits, from which sources, and across which scopes. The roadmap is the prescription: what to do with that diagnosis.

Without data disaggregated by source, it is impossible to identify where the real reduction potential lies, nor to calculate the abatement cost of any measure.

What Makes a Roadmap Strategic Rather Than Just a List of Measures

A list of reduction measures—installing solar panels, electrifying the fleet, improving facility insulation—is not a roadmap. It lacks the dimension that turns those measures into decisions: the quantification of the impact in tCO₂e, the cost per metric ton reduced, the technical feasibility within the company’s specific context, and the sequence that maximizes impact within the constraints of available capital.

A strategic roadmap answers three questions simultaneously: Which measures have the greatest impact? Which are economically viable now? And which require conditions that do not yet exist but for which the company can prepare?

The Starting Point: The Disaggregated GHG Inventory

Why You Can’t Build Without Real Data

Every roadmap starts with a baseline: the level of emissions in the base year, broken down by source and scope. Without that disaggregation, it is impossible to identify where the reduction potential is concentrated or to calculate the impact of any specific measure.

The Scope 1 and 2 inventory is the bare minimum. For most companies in the manufacturing, retail, logistics, or financial services sectors, Scope 3 accounts for between 70% and 90% of the total footprint, which means that a roadmap that ignores it is ignoring most of the problem—and the largest-scale reduction measures.

What Inventory Data Directly Feeds into the Roadmap

The roadmap draws four specific inputs from the GHG inventory:

The distribution of emissions by source identifies where the highest-volume sources are—facility electricity consumption, the transportation fleet, process fuels, and purchases from suppliers—and therefore where the most emissions need to be reduced.

The intensity profile shows the relationship between emissions and economic activity—tCO₂e per unit produced, per mile traveled, per square meter—and allows for projecting how emissions will evolve under different growth scenarios.

Historical trends reveal whether emissions have increased, remained stable, or decreased in recent years, and due to which factors. This information helps build realistic projections.

Materiality by Scope 3 category identifies which categories in the value chain account for the largest volume of indirect emissions and therefore have the greatest potential for reduction through supplier engagement programs or changes in product design.

The Marginal Abatement Cost Curve (MACC)

The Marginal Abatement Cost Curve (MACC) graphically represents the relationship between the cost incurred for each measure to reduce one unit of emissions—the vertical axis, in USD per metric ton of CO₂e—and the total reduction potential of that measure—the horizontal axis, in metric tons of CO₂e.

Each reduction measure is represented by a bar. The width of the bar represents how many metric tons that measure can reduce. The height represents how much it costs to reduce each of those metric tons.

MACCs often reveal “win-win” actions with negative abatement costs—typically energy- and resource-efficiency measures that reduce both emissions and operating expenses. These are the first to be implemented, while higher-cost actions may require longer planning cycles, incentives, or partnership models.

Quick Wins: Measures with a Positive Financial Return

The operational approach is to identify and implement the most cost-effective measures as quick wins—especially those that generate savings—and redirect those savings toward future climate projects.

In practice, the most common negative-cost measures in medium-sized companies include: optimizing HVAC and lighting systems, improving insulation in industrial facilities, optimizing logistics routes, reducing standby power consumption, and actively managing energy demand. Many of these measures have payback periods of two to five years and generate operational savings that can finance higher-cost measures in the next phase.

Many organizations find that their first 10% to 20% of decarbonization pays for itself. By prioritizing high-volume, negative-cost initiatives first, companies can use the savings generated to subsidize the higher-cost “deep decarbonization” technologies that come later in the curve.

High-Cost Measures: When and How to Address Them

Measures with positive abatement costs—such as the electrification of energy-intensive industrial processes, the replacement of fossil fuels with green hydrogen, and point-of-emission carbon capture—are not ruled out based on their current cost. They are planned for the medium- and long-term horizon, when three factors typically converge: the cost of the technology falls due to economies of scale, the price of carbon rises due to regulation, and the company has generated the capital or secured the necessary access to financing to implement them.

The MACC is not static. It must be updated every two or three years to reflect changes in technology costs, electricity grid emission factors, and the regulatory context—factors that can shift measures that are currently costly into the negative-cost range.

The Most Common Mitigation Measures by Scope

The MACC organizes measures by cost and impact. This section organizes them by scope—the other criterion that determines what the company can do under direct control and what requires collaboration with third parties.

Scope 1: Energy Efficiency, Fuels, Refrigerants, and Processes

Scope 1 measures address sources that the company directly controls. The most common ones, in order of typical abatement cost:

Energy efficiency in facilities: optimization of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems; retrofitting of industrial motors; improved insulation; and active demand management. Abatement cost is typically negative or close to zero.

Replacement of fossil fuels in processes: replacing gas or other fossil fuel-fired boilers with renewable heat systems, certified biomass, or heat pumps. The cost varies significantly depending on the industrial sector and the availability of alternatives in the geographic area of operation.

Electrification of the company’s own fleet: converting light- and medium-duty vehicles to electric propulsion. The abatement cost depends on the emission factor of the local power grid—in countries with high renewable energy penetration, such as Chile or Peru, where the energy mix is undergoing transformation, the impact per metric ton can be significantly higher.

Control of refrigerant leaks: Refrigerant gases have Global Warming Potentials ranging from 150 to more than 10,000 times that of CO₂. Controlling these emissions and replacing refrigerants with low-GWP alternatives is one of the measures with the greatest impact per dollar invested in many service and manufacturing sectors.

Process emissions: In specific industrial sectors—cement, steel, and chemicals—process emissions are the most difficult and costly to reduce. They require profound technological changes that must be planned over the long term.

Scope 2: Renewable Energy and Demand Management

Scope 2 measures address the electricity that a company purchases. Here, the typical sequence is:

Reduce consumption first. Before switching to renewables, energy efficiency reduces the amount of electricity that needs to be decarbonized. A company that consumes 20% less electricity needs 20% less renewable capacity to achieve the same level of decarbonization.

Purchasing renewable energy: renewable energy supply contracts (PPAs), renewable energy certificates, or self-consumption through the company’s own photovoltaic installations. In Latin America, corporate PPA markets are expanding rapidly in Chile, Mexico.