How Amsterdam securely anchors its climate ambitions with the Ladder

The Netherlands’ largest municipality and capital city, Amsterdam, has been certified at level 3 of the CO₂ Performance Ladder since 2024. Although the municipality has been actively working on CO₂ reduction for several years, including by making their premises and vehicle fleet more sustainable, the Ladder gives the municipality an extra push, says sustainability officer Judith Strik. ‘Thanks to the CO₂ Performance Ladder, our ambitions, goals and results are more firmly anchored internally. This increases the urgency within the organisation to work on CO₂ reduction.’

As a municipality, when you make ambitious demands on residents and businesses in the city to emit less CO₂ and become circular, you obviously cannot lag behind yourself. Based on this realisation, in 2020 the Amsterdam municipality drew up an Implementation Agenda for a sustainable municipal organisation in 2030, explains Judith Strik, sustainability officer within the municipality. ‘We are demanding a lot from the city, so we have to set the right example ourselves. The Implementation Agenda states, among other things, that we want a fully circular operation and to be completely climate-neutral by 2030. For the city, this target only applies to 2050. So the targets for our organisation are even more ambitious.’

Property and fleet as major consumers

Together with her team at the ‘Green Office’, Strik set to work collecting data and drawing up a footprint of the municipality’s CO₂ emissions. ‘We soon found out that our CO₂ impact is mainly in two places: in our real estate and in our vehicle fleet. We own around 1,000 properties in the city, such as offices, schools, and museums, and have more than 1,500 vehicles driving around, such as rubbish trucks and cars and scooters for enforcers [ed.: City supervision or enforcement officers]. So we started working first with these two main sources of emissions. Among other things, we reduced electricity and gas consumption and switched to green gas from 2022. We already had green electricity from the Netherlands since 2018. We also took the first steps in fully electrifying our vehicle fleet.’

Embedding work on CO₂ reduction more firmly

All this was still done without the deployment of the CO₂ Performance Ladder. In fact, it only came into the picture in 2023, Strik explains. ‘We – fairly and logically –received more and more questions about the fact that we were using the Ladder as an award criterion in tenders, but were not certified ourselves. Hence we decided to start working with the CO₂ Performance Ladder and get certified. But that was not the only reason. We also wanted to professionalise our CO₂ management system and firmly embed our ambitions, goals and results in the field of CO₂ reduction internally. We noticed that although the subject was getting more attention within the organisation, not much was being done about it yet. Since the Ladder requires a management review and is mandatory in nature, working on CO₂ reduction is given much more urgency.’ 

Useful insights from other organisations

Before the municipality started working with the CO₂ Performance Ladder, Strik and her colleagues first visited organisations that already had experience with the Ladder. ‘Among others, we talked to Waternet [ed.: the Water Board for Amsterdam and surroundings] and the municipalities of Rotterdam and Utrecht. One of our fears was that working with the Ladder would be very bureaucratic. That you have to write down things that you do very little with in practice. Just to have a certificate. But those fears were completely dispelled by the discussions. Someone from Waternet, for instance, indicated that it actually helps a lot with practical actions and that they only spend a few hours each week on it. So it is also less labour- and time-intensive than we thought. I found that very reassuring.’

No radical changes, some additional measures

Given the municipality had already set targets for emission reduction from the Implementation Agenda, with corresponding programmes and measures, working with the CO₂ Performance Ladder did not involve any radical changes, says Strik. ‘It mainly fitted in well with what we were already doing. Only slightly more professional, with a six-monthly update of our footprint and an annual audit by an external auditor. In the beginning we engaged a consultant who was experienced in working with the Ladder. We also looked at how much reduction our existing measures would yield. This showed that we still needed to take some additional measures to reach our interim target in 2026 – 83 per cent reduction compared to 2018. As part of this, we recently decided that business travel that take less than 10 hours by train should not be done by plane.’ 

Challenges

Making a large city like Amsterdam more sustainable is quite a task, according to Strik. ‘Firstly, because of the enormous size of our property portfolio and fleet. Planning and implementation takes an awful lot of time and work. Insulating buildings and replacing vehicles with electric ones is also very costly. On top of that, shortages of materials and staff make many things more expensive and difficult to implement. Another challenge is that the insulation of monumental buildings has to meet strict requirements and is therefore complicated. To continue accelerating, we are now focusing on our non-monumental properties. For this, we received a budget of €150 million last year.’

Broader internal communication and cooperation

In March 2024, the municipality of Amsterdam received certification at level 3 of the CO₂ Performance Ladder. Strik: ‘An achievement we are very proud of and also communicate widely about. Not only to the outside world, but also internally. Via intranet and our newsletter, we always kept our employees informed about developments concerning sustainability, but then you often only reach the people who are already working on it. With certification, we are now trying to reach a broader group. We do this by, for example, communicating in an accessible way via TV screens at work sites, such as construction sites. In this way, we hope to raise awareness throughout the organisation. We are also putting more and more effort into internal cooperation, including by involving people from real estate and the fleet in our project team.’

Sharing experiences with other municipalities

Since Amsterdam started working with the CO₂ Performance Ladder, it has been part of a community of practice with more than forty municipalities, such as Arnhem, Rotterdam and The Hague. One purpose of this is to be able to compare our CO₂ footprints and learn from each other, says Strik. ‘As municipalities, we often run into the same things when it comes to reducing CO₂ emissions. It’s great that we can help each other with this. We learned from Rotterdam, for example, how important it is to have a project team in which everyone has a clear task and how you organise such a team. One person in the team focuses on the content, another on managing the organisation. To work efficiently with the Ladder, it is very important that it is clear who is responsible for what.’  

Mapping chain emissions  

Amsterdam also intends to start working on supply chain analyses, which will qualify the municipality for certification on level 4 and 5 of the Ladder. Strik: ‘The exact topics for this are still being determined. In these supply chain analyses, we will identify our indirect emissions. For example, when work is carried out through tenders. This mainly concerns work in public spaces, such as maintenance of streets and quay walls. By carrying out this work with as much electric equipment and sustainable and circular materials as possible, we can make significant progress in CO₂ reduction. By using the Ladder as an award criterion in tenders, we encourage the market to invest in sustainable solutions.’

Advice for other municipalities

Finally, does Strik have any advice for other municipalities that want to work with the CO₂ Performance Ladder? ‘Definitely. Actually the same advice we received ourselves before we started: don’t overestimate it. As a municipality, you have to start working on climate goals and CO₂ reduction anyway. You can start translating all international and national guidelines on your own, come up with measures and try to monitor progress, but it is much more efficient if you use an existing and accessible system like the CO₂ Performance Ladder for this purpose. Possibly with help from an external consultant. It’s a waste if you try to reinvent the wheel yourself. Setting everything up naturally involves some work and time, but once it is up and running and integrated within the organisation, it is really not a time-consuming task.’

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