By David Webb, Chief Sustainability Officer, Managing Director and Senior Partner, BCG
In 2025, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) reached the first of our major target milestones in the net zero journey that we began six years ago. We surpassed our two near-term science-based emissions targets, leading to an absolute emissions reduction of more than one-third against our 2018 baseline, while almost doubling revenue over the same period.
We achieved a 92% reduction in Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions against our 2018 baseline, surpassing our target of 85%, a success driven mainly by shifting to 100% renewable electricity and electrifying office heating and our leased car fleet. Over the same period, we reduced business travel emissions per full-time equivalent (FTE) by 60%, due primarily to a combination of internal measures (including cascading carbon budgets, equipping leaders with tools to manage and monitor progress, and applying an internal carbon charge) and the purchase of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). To compensate for emissions that we can't eliminate, we purchase and retire independently verified carbon credits equivalent to our full footprint each year. We are shifting our portfolio toward carbon dioxide removal (CDR) (now 69% of our credits) and are on track for 100% CDR by 2030. BCG is among the top ten global buyers of durable CDR solutions today. Last year we paid a blended average price of $33 per metric ton, a figure that we expect to reach approximately $80 by 2030.
Six Lessons from Six Years of Climate Action:
Reaching our 2025 target milestone has taught us six key lessons about what it takes to run a credible climate program:
1. Set a stretch target and follow through.
When we committed in 2020 to roughly halving our emissions intensity by 2025, the target seemed ambitious for a firm with travel woven into how we serve clients – but that ambition sparked debate and engagement, which in turn drove progress. Setting a high ambition sharpens focus, demands innovation, and pushes engagement deeper into the value chain.
2. Assign every ton to an owner and put a price on each ton.
We mapped our emissions to the enterprise structure, assigned emissions accountability to the leaders with decision rights, and used carbon budgets to cascade our global targets through business units. Our tiered internal carbon charge (roughly $30 per metric ton within budget, rising to $300 for every ton over budget) created a clear incentive that kept almost all owners within budget.
3. Effective decarbonization depends on context-specific measures.
Our reductions came as a result of stacking many decarbonization measures, not imposing one decisive fix, and the right stack varies by geography. The key is to build a playbook of proven levers and to enable carbon budget owners to tailor a plan best suited to their context.
4. Your value proposition should be your mantra.
To drive sustained engagement across the business, we make the value proposition of our program explicit and frame it in relevant terms. For commercial teams, it’s about credibility and competitiveness; for people teams, it’s about recruitment and retention; for operations and finance teams, it’s about efficiency. Connecting your program’s value to what your key stakeholders already own drives greater engagement and makes it resilient in the face of change.
5. Leading means shaping the frontier.
Because standards, technologies, and markets for climate action are still evolving, leaders face a choice: wait for consensus or help shape it. Recent examples of how BCG is shaping the frontier include launching a pilot to measure flight-specific climate impacts from contrails, accelerating the SAF market by becoming a founding member of SABA, and running a nature-based request for proposal, gathering data from over 250 CDR projects to sharpen our ability to identify high-quality carbon removal projects.
6. Catalyze and influence to multiply your impact.
We have been an early and active supporter of various breakthrough climate solutions, including durable CDR and SAF. Often our support goes beyond simple purchase agreements. We explore other ways to unlock potential, such as by offering pro bono services to help promising ventures build growth strategies, promoting our partnerships publicly to build momentum, and participating in coalitions and buyer groups to multiply positive impacts.
Six years after we began our sustainability journey, our experience has shown that meaningful climate progress depends not on individual commitments or stated ambitions, but on the ability to maintain direction and to drive lasting impact while adapting to changing circumstances.
BCG is partnering with Climate Week NYC this year to contribute to the exchange of practical lessons between businesses, governments, and other leaders working through what it takes to turn climate ambition into durable results.
That conversation will continue at The Hub Live on September 22nd, where Alex Dewar, Managing Director & Partner at BCG, will join The AI Forum: Scaling Sustainable Infrastructure. The session will examine how growing AI demand is reshaping energy and infrastructure needs – and how sustainable data center development can help unlock investment and accelerate the energy transition.
Learn more about BCG’s net zero strategy and the firm’s climate progress.