Designing CEFC's Net Zero Agriculture Initiative
Contracted as Product Designer at the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to replace a dense, inaccessible 30+ page PDF with a navigable digital product: the Net Zero Agriculture Pathfinder, featuring decision-oriented SVG infographics and audience-specific content journeys.
About this project
The Clean Energy Finance Corporation deploys government-backed capital into clean energy and sustainable infrastructure across Australia.
When I joined as an embedded product designer in 2024, CEFC's Net Zero Agriculture guidance existed as a 30+ page PDF. Dense tables of emissions reduction pathways, investment criteria written for policy specialists, financial thresholds presented without context. Accurate and thorough - and practically inaccessible to the farmers it was designed to help.
I was contracted to design the Net Zero Agriculture Pathfinder: a navigable web platform to replace the PDF.
What we were up against
CEFC's audience isn't one person. Farmers want to know which emissions reduction pathways apply to their operation. Investors want investment criteria and return thresholds. Policymakers want high-level impact framing. Journalists want the headline numbers.
A single PDF can't route different readers to different content. It can't surface what's most relevant to someone's situation. It can't make a complex emissions pathway decision-ready for someone managing land, not a spreadsheet.
The secondary challenge was the regulatory environment. CEFC operates where accuracy and compliance are non-negotiable. Every design decision - what to surface, what to simplify, how to visualise - required justification to senior leadership and subject matter experts across multiple rounds of review. That process isn't friction; it's what makes the work credible.
Information architecture
Hover a persona to trace their journey through the platform.
Farm manager
Financial returns & emissions reduction
Consultant
Advising agricultural clients
Decision-maker
Aligning operations with net-zero strategy
Tap to explore
Shared entry — all audiences
Introduction
Audience identification & scope of the Pathfinder
Agricultural emissions
Context on farming's environmental footprint in Australia
Farm manager + consultant
Decision-maker
Getting started
Interactive journeyStructured pathway to emissions reduction planning
Baselining GHG emissions
Data inventoryData inventory requirements for measuring farm emissions
Bypasses technical setup
Getting started
Three-phase operational setup
Baselining GHG emissions
Granular field-level data inventory
Goes directly to strategic alignment and financing context
Farm Emissions Reduction Plan
Design artifactStrategic planning aligned to business objectives
Farm emissions reduction activities
SVG infographicPractical interventions across four footprint areas
Footprint areas
Agronomic
Fertiliser optimisation, nitrification inhibitors
Livestock
Pasture improvement, methane reduction
Energy
Solar systems, electric vehicles
Land use
Permanent plantings, carbon sequestration
14 sub-pages across 4 categories
CEFC strategy & finance
Strategy briefOrganisational context, financing pathways, contact
Content areas
Org context
CEFC mandate, sector strategy, and investment priorities
Financing
Loan products, eligibility criteria, and emissions-linked structures
Contact
Start a conversation with the CEFC agriculture team
PDF download retained as fallback
Original document retained for low-connectivity and print use
How I worked
The research came first. I conducted sessions with 10+ participants to map where existing information structures were failing - where users got lost, what they expected to find, and the vocabulary they actually used to think about clean energy finance.
The IA decisions followed directly from what the research revealed. I split content that had been conflated in the PDF into distinct audience journeys: farming operations, investment criteria, and policy context. Each entry point surfaced the content most relevant to that reader first, rather than requiring them to scan the whole document.
The core transformation was tables to visuals. CEFC's source material presented emissions reduction pathways as dense data tables - rows of figures that required significant domain knowledge to interpret. I designed custom SVG infographics that made those pathways scannable and decision-oriented: what action, what cost range, what emissions impact for a typical operation.
The work went through 4 stakeholder review cycles: presenting to senior leadership and subject matter experts, incorporating technical and regulatory feedback, and iterating without compromising usability. Documentation - explaining rationale and accessibility requirements - was as important as the design itself.
Design iteration — 7 rounds
Concept 1/ 7Three-column layout with resources panel, testing contextual links alongside contentResults & impact
The Pathfinder launched in early 2025 and remains the live platform for CEFC's net zero agriculture guidance 18 months on, with no structural redesign, verifiable via the Wayback Machine.
The Pathfinder was named in CEFC's 2024–25 Annual Report to the Australian Parliament as a resource helping farmers navigate emissions reduction, within a portfolio that saw $339 million in new agriculture sector commitments that year.
As an embedded contractor within the engineering team, I established design credibility quickly — over-documenting rationale, presenting decisions in terms the technical and policy teams already valued, and shipping iteratively across 4 stakeholder review cycles with no scope creep.
The project shipped to WCAG 2.1 AA standards across a 30+ page navigable platform with nested audience journeys, custom SVG infographics, and interactive decision flows.