Designing CEFC's Net Zero Agriculture Initiative

A 30-page PDF, written for four different readers

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) invests government-backed capital in clean energy and sustainable infrastructure across Australia. Its Towards Net Zero Agriculture guidance, developed with CSIRO, lived in a 30+ page PDF: dense tables of emissions reduction activities, investment criteria written for policy specialists, and financial thresholds with no context around them.

I was contracted as the sole designer on the Net Zero Agriculture Pathfinder, a web platform built to replace the document. I owned the information architecture, the interface, and the diagrams, working with senior leadership, engineering, and subject matter experts.

It was one of two CEFC projects in the engagement. The other was the 2023-24 Annual Report, a digital-only statutory publication.

One document, and nobody could find their part

The guidance had four audiences, and each wanted something different from it. A farm manager wanted to know which changes would pay for themselves. A consultant needed something practical to take to a client. An investor was weighing criteria and returns. A policymaker was looking for impact.

The PDF gave all four the same front-to-back read. There was no way to jump to what mattered for your situation, so the guidance only worked for people willing to read all of it. For a farmer deciding whether to look into finance, that’s a reason to put it down.

The diagrams were a second barrier. They were built for print, so a screen reader couldn’t read them and they didn’t hold up on a small screen. Guidance from a government-backed corporation has to work for everyone it’s written for, and these diagrams didn’t.

Every design decision also needed sign-off from subject matter experts. CEFC works in a regulated environment, where a diagram that simplified an emissions figure the wrong way is a compliance problem, not just a design one.

Start where people got lost

Discovery research with 10+ participants showed where people got lost in the existing document, and the words they used for what they were looking for, which often weren’t the PDF’s. I paired that with my own desk research on accessibility, checked against WCAG 2.1 AA, and benchmarked how well-established sites handle deep, text-heavy navigation.

Two findings shaped everything after. People came to the guidance with a question about their own situation, not to read a report, so the structure had to start from who they were. And the diagrams had to be rebuilt, not reformatted.

Route by who’s reading, not by chapter

The Pathfinder opens with a shared introduction: who it’s for, and the context for agricultural emissions. From there, three journeys cover the four audiences, farm manager, consultant or adviser, and decision-maker, and each puts its most relevant content first.

The guidance itself follows three stages, Prepare, Consider, and Implement, leading into a Farm Emissions Reduction Plan. Activities sit under four footprint areas a farmer would recognise from their own operation:

Agronomic: variable rate fertiliser and lime, nitrification inhibitors
Livestock: pasture rejuvenation, methane inhibitors
Energy: solar and storage, electric farm vehicles
Land use change: permanent plantings, carbon sequestration

Every activity page follows the same pattern: the emissions benefit, co-benefits, barriers, then numbered implementation steps. Once you’ve read one, you know how to read the rest. What had been one long document became 30+ pages you could navigate.

A sidebar for a page that’s mostly words

With three levels of content, the sidebar did most of the work. I explored seven layout concepts, from three-column layouts with resource panels to contextual linking between sections, before settling on one persistent sidebar beside the content.

Because every page is text-heavy, I gave the sidebar a light tint so navigation and reading read as separate areas, and offered white or a stone tint as fallbacks. CEFC wanted a much stronger contrast between the two. I argued for keeping it subtle: the sidebar is there to orient people, and the content is what they came to read. A heavy contrast would have made the navigation compete with the guidance on every page.

Then came the details a deep menu lives or dies on: hover states, how third-level pages show, and which sections start expanded when someone lands. I suggested search to filter the pages, which ended up in the header alongside the CEFC logo and the page title, so readers always know where they are and can get anywhere from there. On mobile, I followed large consumer sites like carsales with a full-width menu, and kept third-level pages working the same way.

I also mocked the layout up on a wide screen, which settled that the whole page should be centre aligned. When CEFC saw the staging build, the verdict on the navigation was simple: they liked it.

Questioning the Venn diagram

I started the diagrams with what looked like the simplest one: a Venn diagram showing which activities the Pathfinder focuses on, where evidence of effectiveness, what farmers want, and CEFC’s investment strategy overlap.

Activities about which there is sufficient evidence of effectiveness
Low emissions activities or enterprise change that farmers want
Low emissions activities consistent with CEFC TNZ Agricultural Investment Strategy

Seven segments, each styled on its own, in CEFC's brand greens.

It wasn’t simple. Before redrawing it, I asked whether the three groups actually overlapped beyond that centre. If they didn’t, a Venn diagram was claiming relationships that didn’t exist, and an Euler diagram would tell the truth and give more room to design. I built all seven segments so each could be styled on its own, and lowered the opacity of one circle so the text over it kept accessible contrast. Every label is real text, not part of an image.

I also flagged an idea for after the MVP: shorter labels that open a tooltip or panel with the full detail. It didn’t survive a mobile check. On a small screen, a panel means just as much panning as the page.

Diagrams that answer one question

For the bar charts, I designed for how people would actually read them: the title, then whether the change over five years was significant. Green tones mark gains like rising soil carbon, warmer tones mark rising emissions, all from CEFC’s brand book. I left-aligned the text for readability and replaced a cluster of arrows with simple perpendicular lines to mark each difference.

Example of estimating soil carbon change using a fixed or historical baseline (5 years)

Change in soil carbon stocks

Change in project emissions

Net abatement at year 5

Net abatement = increase in soil carbon stocks − increase in project emissions

Brackets instead of arrows, and two colours that mean the same thing in every chart.

I redrew the farm diagram to fit CEFC’s brand, pairing each gas with where it comes from on a farm and the activities that reduce it. The source file was over 5MB, and my SVG was still 3.8MB, so I flagged it to the developer before it shipped. On a rural connection, a diagram that slow is a diagram nobody sees.

Illustration of a farm with paddocks, crops, livestock, machinery, buildings, and trees. — Each gas linked to its sources on the farm, and to the Pathfinder activities that reduce it.

The baseline boundaries diagram answers the question a farmer has to settle before counting anything: which emissions are theirs. On-farm activities and purchased energy sit inside the operational boundary, with the supply chain on either side.

Supply chain

Upstream activities

(Scope 3, part I)

Pre-farm emissions associated with the production and transport of inputs purchased for on-farm use:

Fertilisers & agrochemicals
Fuel & energy extraction
Livestock
Animal feeds
Upstream transport & travel

Farm enterprise

On-farm activities

(Scope 1)

Direct emissions from activities on the farm:

Fertilisers & lime
Livestock production
Manure management
Crop residue management
Operations, machinery & fuel

Energy purchase

(Scope 2)

Emissions associated with grid supplied energy production

Operational boundary

Cradle to farm-gate

Supply chain

Downstream activities

(Scope 3, part II)

Post-farm emissions associated with transport and processing down the supply chain:

Transport & distribution
Processing & packaging of produce
End-use or end-of-life

Cradle to factory-gate

Scope 1, 2, and 3 as places on a map, not definitions in a paragraph.

Making every decision easy to sign off

The work went through four review cycles with senior leadership and subject matter experts, and each one changed something, from colours to where key sections sat on the page. In a regulated environment, a good design wasn’t enough on its own. Reviewers had to be able to sign it off. So every design went over with the rationale written out, options where the decision was CEFC’s, and the open questions worth putting to the experts, like whether the Venn diagram’s groups really overlapped.

Some of my ideas didn’t make it, and some shouldn’t have. I designed icons for the process steps. CEFC liked them, but kept numbers: the content referred to its parts by number, so numbered steps matched how the guidance was written.

Not everything needed redesigning, either. When the footer came up, with options to condense it or move it into the sidebar, my answer was to leave it where it was. And the original PDF stayed available as a download, for farmers with patchy connectivity and anyone who wanted to print it.

Named in a report to Parliament

When the MVP went to CEFC, the word back was that they loved it, and CSIRO thought it was great too. Scope was held tightly to the MVP, with enhancements left for the following year.

The Pathfinder launched in early 2025: 30+ pages with audience journeys, accessible diagrams, and interactive decision flows, all meeting WCAG 2.1 AA. Eighteen months on, it has run without a structural redesign.

CEFC then named it in its Annual Report to the Australian Parliament, as a resource helping farmers navigate emissions reduction. That year, CEFC made $339M in new commitments in the agriculture sector. The Pathfinder isn’t the reason for that number, but it is part of how CEFC explained to Parliament the way it supports farmers.

What I’d do differently

I’d agree success measures before launch. CEFC already had analytics in place, but the strongest evidence of impact today is a citation, not usage. Knowing which journeys people take, where they drop off, and how many go on to ask about finance would show whether the structure works.

I’d also hand over the parked ideas as a backlog. Search filtering, the diagram tooltips, and the open questions about the Venn diagram were all deferred for the MVP. Writing them up with a priority and a rationale would have made the following year’s enhancements a plan, not a memory.

Replaced a 30+ page government PDF with a platform later cited to the Australian Parliament, inside a portfolio backing $339M in agriculture climate finance.