In 2025, 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. (See Exhibit 1.)
The environment in which we operate has changed considerably since 2020. Technologies, standards, markets, expectations, and our own business have evolved—some in ways that made our sustainability work easier, and others in ways that made it harder. At the same time, the underlying data confirms the need for continued action, as 2024 became the first calendar year in which the global annual average temperature exceeded 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. Against this backdrop, our commitment remains unshaken. This article examines what it took to achieve our climate targets, where and how we had to adapt, and what we learned along the way.
Since our baseline year, we’ve cut emissions by more than a third while nearly doubling revenue, demonstrating that business growth and climate leadership can advance together. — David Webb, Managing Director & Senior Partner, Chief Sustainability Officer, Managing Director of North American Systems
Surpassing Our 2025 Targets
We achieved a 92% reduction in Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions against our 2018 baseline, surpassing our target of 85%. (See Exhibit 2.) Roughly 80% of that decline in emissions came from reducing energy consumption and shifting to 100% renewable electricity sources to power our offices, with the remainder coming from electrifying office heating and our leased car fleet. Progress of this kind is not the work of one team. It requires consistent engagement across functions as diverse as global real estate, finance, and office operations—a collaboration that we formalized in 2025 through our Sustainable Operations Network.
Business travel remains our largest single source of emissions, accounting for more than 70% of our footprint, which is why we closely watch our Scope 3 business travel emissions per full-time equivalent (FTE). In 2025, we reduced these emissions by 60% against our 2018 baseline, surpassing our 48.5% target and moving ahead of our SBTi-validated 2030 target of 58%. (See Exhibit 3.) This success came primarily from internal action: cascading carbon budgets, embracing purposeful co-location, equipping leaders with tools and dashboards to manage and monitor progress, and applying an internal carbon charge. Improvements in aviation and in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) also contributed. To drive this work, each business unit now has a net zero lead—a senior leader who is responsible for identifying and applying the levers best suited to reducing travel emissions, given their geographical context.
For the emissions that we can’t eliminate, we purchase and retire independently verified carbon credits equivalent to our full Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 footprint. By adopting this approach, we have maintained carbon neutral status since 2018, most recently aligned with ISO 14086-1. We subject our carbon credit purchases to a rigorous, risk-based assessment of quality and integrity that includes systematic due diligence by internal and external specialists and review by a committee composed of BCG experts and senior leaders. Before we make a purchase, the committee weighs diligence and third-party ratings to ensure that a project meets our strict standards. We continue to shift our carbon credit portfolio toward carbon dioxide removal (CDR) solutions and to increase our share of high-quality durable CDR technologies. Currently, 69% of BCG’s credits are CDR, up from 56% in 2024, keeping the firm on track for our carbon removal goal of 100% by 2030. Crucially, we maintain high-quality credits: in 2025, 96% of the credits we retired were rated BBB or above by
Six Lessons from Six Years
Reaching our 2025 target milestone has taught us a lot about what it takes to run a credible climate program. Six key lessons stand out:
1. Set a stretch target, and follow through. When we committed in 2020 to roughly halving our emissions intensity within five years, the target seemed ambitious for a fast-growing firm with travel woven into how we serve clients and develop our people. Setting a stretch target sparked debate across the firm about what was feasible, what resources would be required, and what structural changes might be necessary. That debate—together with the engagement and innovation it generated—was essential to delivering our near-term targets. Our 2050 SBTi-validated net zero target seems similarly challenging to us today. But that is precisely the value of the target. Setting the ambition high keeps us focused, forces innovation, and pushes engagement deeper into our value chain.
2. Assign every ton to an owner, and put a price on each ton. We invested significant time in mapping our emissions to the enterprise structure so that we could assign accountability to the leaders who had decision rights. We used this data to establish carbon budgets that cascade our global targets through existing business units and governance structures. To reinforce accountability, we introduced an internal carbon charge: budget owners paid a base rate of roughly $30 per metric ton of CO₂e when they stayed within budget, but the rate rose to $300 for each ton over budget. Combined with actionable dashboards that track performance from the global level down to the individual level, this system of tiered charges created a clear incentive. As a result, almost all owners remained within budget—not because a central team policed every decision, but because the right governance, information, and incentives motivated owners to manage their budgets effectively.
3. Effective decarbonization depends on context-specific measures. Our emissions reductions did not come from a single decisive measure; they came from stacking many contributing measures. And crucially, the right stack differs by geography and context. Substituting rail for short-haul flights works well across parts of Europe, but less so in other regions. The same is true of co-location norms, meeting formats, and fleet electrification. The most important thing is to create a playbook of proven levers and then enable budget owners to tailor a plan that works in their context, accepting that some plays will underperform and have to be dropped. Creating networks and forums in which participants can share successes and failures and tap competitive spirit strengthens action and catalyzes progress.
4. Your value proposition should be your mantra. Although BCG maintains a strong leadership mandate for its sustainability program, that may not be evident to stakeholders at greater distances from the agenda. Consequently, we make our value proposition explicit, and we frame it in relevant terms. For example, in our commercial teams, the connection involves credibility and competitiveness: many clients view climate action as table stakes, and others see it as an important differentiator. For our people teams, the relevant consideration is recruitment and retention: surveys indicate that the sustainability program contributes to people choosing to join and stay at BCG, and smarter travel also supports staff well-being. For our operations and finance teams, the lever is efficiency: carbon budgets and thoughtful co-location reduce time spent out of market, travel costs, and carbon emissions. Understanding stakeholders’ varying priorities and connecting the sustainability program’s value to what they already own keep it resilient to change over time.
5. Leading means shaping the frontier. Sustainability leadership is challenging because, by definition, the frontier is unclear. Standards, methods, and markets are not yet fully formed, which presents leaders with a choice: wait for consensus to emerge before acting, or work alongside other leaders to help shape the future consensus. Two examples from the past year show what that collaboration looks like in practice. In carbon accounting, we ran a pilot program with the Rocky Mountain Institute, drawing on flight-level data to model the non-greenhouse-gas warming effects of aviation, such as contrails, a relatively nascent and technical topic. The study found that those effects were roughly 50% lower than current estimates and that 80% of the impact came from just 2% of the flights. These new insights are changing our approach to measuring and mitigating the impact of contrails. In the carbon removal space, we ran a request for proposals for nature-based removals that attracted more than 200 project submissions, deepening our knowledge of a fast-evolving market. The process gave us structured, comparable data across a wide range of frontier projects, sharpening our ability to identify high-quality projects that closely aligned with our requirements and that we could contract with at an earlier stage, increasing our catalytic impact.
6. Catalyze and influence to multiply your impact. Addressing climate change at the required pace depends on scaling technologies faster than any single buyer can accomplish alone, so we have sought to make our influence count for more than our own footprint. That effort includes helping establish durable CDR as an essential complement to emissions reductions. Because complete elimination of emissions in hard-to-abate sectors such as aviation is unlikely, we try to advance technologies and projects that remove carbon permanently and at scale. We have been an early and active supporter of various breakthrough solutions, including direct air capture, biochar, and other durable CDR technologies, and our support goes beyond simple purchase agreements. We explore other ways to unlock potential, such as offering pro-bono services to help promising ventures build growth strategies, efforts to publicize high-impact deals that strengthen investor and buyer confidence, and participation in coalitions and buyer groups to multiply positive impacts. So far, we have contracted over 275,000 metric tons of durable CDR, a record that places BCG among the top 10 buyers globally.
The Path Ahead to 2030—and 2050
Much of our progress so far has involved taking action in areas within our own control: how we power our offices, manage our fleet, deploy our teams, and make travel choices. The road from here will be harder, requiring action on parts of our footprint that we influence rather than command, and relying on the willingness of suppliers, airlines, fuel producers, and technology partners to change with us. Progress will depend to a greater extent on changes that we achieve across our value chain—and fostering those changes takes time. One early example is a low-carbon office fit-out standard that our global real estate team developed in collaboration with external experts. Now at a pilot stage, it will guide the design of future BCG offices worldwide and align architects, contractors, furniture providers, and material suppliers on a common set of requirements.
Another fast-emerging topic is artificial intelligence (AI), which is reshaping how we and our clients work. AI-related emissions vary widely depending on the use case and on how the underlying data centers are powered, so our leverage lies in promoting efficient use and lower-carbon infrastructure. We are speaking with our AI partners to better understand the impact of our usage and then acting where we can—for example, by selecting data centers backed by 100% renewable electricity where we have control. Our task going forward is to minimize adverse environmental impacts through responsible deployment, while unlocking the technology’s immense potential to advance climate action across industry and society.
Six years after we began our sustainability journey, the landscape is still shifting. Our response is not to change what we are aiming for, but to remain focused on real-world outcomes rather than announcements, to keep our claims credible, and to continue to strengthen our approach in an evolving environment. Our experience has shown that meaningful climate progress depends not on individual commitments or stated ambitions, but on the ability to maintain direction and drive lasting impact while adapting to changing circumstances.
