A vision statement helps to motivate your team and guide your organisation. A good vision statement should be written collaboratively with inputs from multiple stakeholders. It should inspire both employees and investors while engaging with the aspirations of your customers. It paints a picture of your company's future and the impact you want your business to have on the world. They are generally short in length, specific but not too finite or short-term in their aspirations. Typically a vision statement can range in length from one sentence to a very short paragraph.

Your climate action statement can be either separate or part of your overall corporate vision statement. Like a company’s general vision statement, a climate action vision statement is an aspirational statement that expresses your company's long-term goals and is a key part of your environmental brand image. A good vision statement works best when it’s simple, memorable, inspirational and clearly describes an end goal. This statement can be revisited as your climate action activities progress.

Make it ambitious but feasible: A climate action vision statement needs to be ambitious but also feasible and achievable within a reasonable timeframe. Corporate vision statements can be more abstract, but a climate action vision statement needs to communicate your serious and systematic approach to cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Over time your vision statement can be amended to reflect a better understanding of the challenges and the growing capacity of all stakeholders to bring about meaningful change.

Your climate action vision statement can be divided into two publishing stages:

• Begin with a broad aspirational statement that is unique to your organisation and activities. At this stage it need not have specific timeframes or performance criteria.

• Once you have measured your current carbon footprint, established a baseline year and developed a clear climate action plan (see charter commitments 8, 9, 10 & 11), you can update your vision statement goals and also include a target year or timeframe.

• Encourage Collaboration: The climate action vision statement should reflect the principles and aspirations of your entire organisation. Gather key decision makers to participate in vision statement development and circulate drafts to these same people to get maximum participation.

• Set Scientifically Verifiable Goals: Your carbon footprint reduction goals should be backed by verifiable science based criteria that ensures that you can actually achieve the targets you are setting.

• Seek Expert Advice: Engage with experts and other organisations that have started their net zero journeys to get insight on best practices.