Climate and energy management policy: method, targets and scopes

What a climate and energy policy actually measures

A climate and energy management policy is the document that turns a general environmental intention into an actual measurement method. It states what counts as an emission the company is responsible for, how that emission gets calculated, and what target the company is working toward and by when.

This is different from an operational sustainability policy, which states what a company does day to day, buying used equipment, choosing train over plane. A climate and energy policy sits one layer above that: it takes the raw activity data those operational choices generate and turns it into a single trackable number, then sets a target against that number.

For a small company with no factory and no fleet, the policy is usually short, because the sources of emissions are limited to a handful of categories: electricity, travel, equipment, and digital services. The value of the document is not its length but whether it names a method precise enough that the same calculation would give the same answer if someone else ran it.

A reader evaluating a supplier on climate grounds is usually looking for exactly this: not a promise, but a repeatable calculation. A method that names its data sources, its emission factors and its update cadence can be checked year over year, while a method described only in general terms cannot be checked at all.

The three GHG scopes, explained plainly

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the standard corporate accounting framework developed by the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, splits a company's emissions into three scopes. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from sources the company owns or controls, such as its own vehicles or boilers. Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from electricity, heat or cooling the company buys. Scope 3 covers everything else in the value chain: purchased goods and services, business travel, commuting, waste.

A services company with no production and no vehicles typically has no Scope 1 emissions at all. Its Scope 2 comes from the electricity used wherever people actually work. Its Scope 3, usually its largest category by far, comes from business travel, computer equipment purchases, cloud and internet services, and paper and printing.

Knowing which scope a given activity falls into matters because it determines how the activity gets measured. Electricity is typically calculated from bills and a grid emission factor; travel is typically calculated from a logged distance and mode multiplied by a published transport emission factor. A policy that names its scopes but not its calculation method has described the destination without the route.

When EU energy law actually reaches a small company

The EU Energy Efficiency Directive, Directive (EU) 2023/1791, sets two thresholds under Article 11, both measured in energy consumption rather than headcount or turnover. Above 85 terajoules a year, a company must run a certified energy management system, in place by 11 October 2027. Above 10 terajoules a year, a company without an energy management system must undergo a mandatory energy audit at least every four years, with a first audit by 11 October 2026.

Ten terajoules is a substantial amount of energy, well beyond what a small office-based team consumes in a year. In practice, the Directive's own text expects most small and micro enterprises to fall below both thresholds, and instructs Member States to run programmes that encourage, rather than mandate, voluntary energy audits for companies that size. A small company is not the intended target of this obligation, and neither threshold requires it to hold a climate policy at all.

That leaves climate and energy policies for small companies almost entirely voluntary, adopted because a customer, a bank or a tender process asks for one, or because the company wants a way to track its own footprint over time regardless of any legal duty to do so.

What a credible target looks like on paper

A credible target names a baseline year, a target year, a percentage change, and the denominator the percentage applies to. "We will reduce emissions" states nothing that can be checked later. "A 30 percent cut per 1,000 working hours by 2030 against a 2026 baseline" states a figure that either gets hit or does not.

The choice of denominator matters. An emissions target measured per employee, per hour worked, or per unit of revenue behaves quite differently from an absolute target as a company grows or shrinks. A per-hour or per-employee target can still show a real cut in intensity even while the company's total activity, and therefore its absolute emissions, is growing.

A credible policy also states what happens if the target is missed. A document that only states the target and stays silent on a miss is untested; one that commits in advance to publishing the reason and the corrective action for the following year is built to survive contact with a bad year.

A target should also name who owns it. A commitment with no named person responsible for calculating the figure and reporting it each year tends to quietly lapse the first time other priorities compete for attention, regardless of how precise the target sounded when it was written.

Ripe Leads' KKP-1: the method and the targets

Ripe Leads, the trading name of UAB "Kofi Tech," publishes its Climate and Energy Management Programme as document KKP-1, which supplements its Operational Sustainability Policy, OVT-1, and implements the environmental section of its ESG statement.

KKP-1 states plainly that the company has no Scope 1 emissions: "no production, no boilers and no vehicles." Its Scope 2 is electricity used at workplaces, calculated from workplace bills, with home workplaces apportioned by the ratio of working hours. Its Scope 3 covers business travel, computer equipment purchased, cloud and internet services, and paper and printing, with travel emissions calculated from the travel log kept under OVT-1, multiplied by a transport emission factor. The programme uses the Lithuanian grid factor for electricity and publicly published transport factors for travel, with the source and year stated in each year's report.

KKP-1 sets four numbered targets. The headline target is a 30 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions per 1,000 working hours by 2030, measured against a baseline set in calendar year 2026. A second target keeps flight count from growing year over year, applying the same 8-hour ground-transport threshold set in OVT-1. A third keeps used or refurbished equipment at 50 percent or more of all equipment purchased, every year. A fourth commits to reducing pages printed each year "until only legally required printing remains."

The director is named as responsible for running the programme, collects the year's data and calculates the GHG figure by 31 March each year, and reviews the targets and method annually, approving any change by order. Results are published at kofitech.eu alongside the ESG annual review, and where a target is missed, the report states the reason and the action planned for the following year. The full text sits at the KKP-1 document on the sustainability page.

The one number this document does not give

KKP-1 defines a method and a target. It does not state, anywhere in its text, an actual calculated figure: no total kilowatt-hours, no tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, and no baseline number for the 2026 year the 30 percent target is measured against.

That gap is worth naming plainly rather than glossing over. A target measured against an undisclosed baseline cannot yet be checked by an outside reader, because there is no published starting point to check it against. The first year the baseline itself gets calculated and published will be the point at which the target becomes verifiable rather than aspirational.

This is a distinction worth watching for in any climate policy, not just this one: a stated method and a stated target are necessary, but a target only becomes checkable once the actual baseline number is on the page next to it.

What this policy does not prove

KKP-1 is self-authored and approved internally by UAB "Kofi Tech." It is not audited, certified or verified by any third party, and no sustainability label, badge or score is claimed for it or for any of the other twelve documents published alongside it. From 27 September 2026, the Empowering Consumers Directive, (EU) 2024/825, bans a self-awarded sustainability label outright, one more reason these pages carry no badge.

A reader who needs a verified emissions figure rather than a stated method and target should ask directly whether an independent calculation exists, because none is claimed here. What the document offers instead is a transparent, dated method that a reader can check against the company's own published data once that data starts appearing, alongside all thirteen documents Ripe Leads publishes in the same set.