Efficiency & Emissions

Pursuing carbon neutrality and deploying Smart Climate Solutions to support cost savings and emission reductions.

Click through to learn about our 2024 impact in action. For detailed data, please see our corporate responsibility KPI webpage.

The latest World Meteorological Organization update indicates there is an 80% chance global temperatures will exceed 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. As global temperatures have risen, so too has the frequency of unpredictable weather events and devastating natural disasters. Stakeholders important to our business expect us to do our part to drive meaningful action. With growing energy demands across the world, it’s important that the country has access to a mix of energy sources and that corporations explore innovative ways to reduce consumption and improve resilience.

We are addressing our own emissions in a responsible and financially beneficial way, as well as supporting customers and suppliers to do the same. We are also working strategically to enhance resilience for our network operations and the communities in which we operate.

In 2020, we committed to Scope 1 and 2¹ carbon neutrality across global operations by 2035; in 2021, we set interim targets that were approved by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). Our Scope 1 and 2 2030 SBTi target aligns with a 1.5°C pathway.

To help assess and reduce our impact — and related impacts on our operations — we have developed a strategy that focuses on:

1. Lowering emissions
2. Building resilience
3. Seizing opportunities

1. Lowering Emissions

To meet our goals, we work to minimize our emissions through financially prudent approaches, targeting continuous improvements through:

• Energy efficiency projects and network optimization efforts
• Renewable energy procurement
• Transitioning our fleet to low-carbon alternatives

Though we aim to reduce emissions as much as possible, there may be some sources that cannot be eliminated. In these cases, we may, in the future, invest in carbon offsets. We are committed to pursuing only the most credible offsets and to being transparent in our approach. To date, offsets are not included in our carbon footprint.

Energy Efficiency and Network Optimization

We drive operational and network energy efficiencies, updating systems and decommissioning obsolete assets to reduce annual energy consumption. We also conduct proof of concept trials and implement technology-enabled solutions across our facilities and network that can deliver scalable energy savings.

To understand current performance, we strategically use AT&T connectivity and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to acquire data from facility equipment and network assets. We analyze the data centrally to set baselines, monitor status and identify required maintenance in real time to identify opportunities for reducing costs and unnecessary energy use. 

Renewable Energy Procurement

Where we do use energy, we work to meet more of our needs with energy from renewable sources, recognizing that Scope 2 emissions (from purchased electricity) account for most of our operational emissions (Scope 1 and 2). We actively explore financially beneficial large-scale renewables contracts, acquiring renewable energy credits to validate our purchases. Through renewable energy contracts, we not only reduce our carbon footprint, but also realize cost savings for the company.

AT&T reports market-based Scope 2 emissions in accordance with the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol, enabling us to account for renewable electricity in our portfolio. Learn more about our energy efficiency efforts and renewable energy use in our Energy Management issue brief.

Low-Carbon Fleet

Our ground fleet constitutes the largest proportion of our Scope 1 emissions. We aim to reduce fleet emissions by at least 76% by 2035, investing in electric vehicles (EVs) — as well as the infrastructure needed to support them. We hold active membership with the Corporate Electric Vehicle Alliance to identify more opportunities to add EVs to our fleet while addressing wider challenges to adoption.

Scope 3 Emissions

Scope 3² emissions are our largest single emissions source and, as such, collaborating with key suppliers to address value chain emissions also remains an ongoing priority. This includes supporting our suppliers to set, and progress against, their own emissions-reduction goals.

Learn more about our Scope 3 emissions categories in our 2024 Scope 3 Emissions Categories document.

2. Building Resilience

We integrate advanced data into decision-making processes to protect our business and infrastructure against severe weather-related impacts.

AT&T assesses how regulations, technology developments and market or reputational factors could affect our company. We consider long-term projected impacts and seek new ways to integrate data into planning systems to inform infrastructure decisions.

Learn more about our Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) process in our Ethics & Integrity issue brief. 

Scenario Analysis

In 2023, we engaged an external vendor to complete a scenario analysis aligned with Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) recommendations. For more information, see our TCFD Report and Climate Strategy & Transition Plan.

Physical Risks

Keeping our network and operations up and running is critical to the millions who rely on AT&T connectivity. That’s why we’re assessing, managing and working to reduce the potential impacts and magnitude of physical risks on our operations. We conduct regular analysis and implement solutions to help ensure that our network infrastructure, such as cell sites, can withstand natural disasters and other environmental factors.

Transition Risks

We are exploring both the potential risks and opportunities to AT&T associated with a lower-emissions economy. For instance, changes in federal, state and foreign government regulation could result in additional costs of compliance or litigation. 

The ClimRR Portal

Together with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office, we created the ClimRR (climate risk and resilience) portal. The portal provides cutting-edge, localized projections — based on underlying datasets containing over 60 variables — and projects future hazards like extreme heat, heavy rainfall and wildfire.

ClimRR helps improve America’s preparedness for extreme weather events, making some of the world’s most sophisticated modeling freely and publicly accessible so state, local, tribal and territorial emergency managers and community leaders can explore localized data on future risks to inform resilience strategies.

Learn more about how we’re driving resilience in our Network Resilience issue brief.

3. Seizing Opportunities

We leverage our product portfolio to support our business customers’ emissions-reduction ambitions. In 2021, we launched the Gigaton Goal to deliver connectivity solutions that will help enable business customers reduce their consumption and expenses, and to collectively save a gigaton (1 billion metric tons) of GHG emissions between 2018 and 2035.³ To achieve this ambitious target, we are developing Smart Climate Solutions that integrate AT&T Fiber, 5G and IoT with complementary technologies that help companies become more efficient and move us to a lower-carbon economy.

But we understand connectivity-enabled efficiency isn’t enough; we also need to stimulate game-changing innovation that fundamentally shifts how we think about emissions reduction. We believe Smart Climate Solutions can both enhance efficiency in traditional operations for our business customers and foster the growth of new, emissions-reducing industries in six key areas:

• Smart Buildings: Enable energy and emissions monitoring, optimization and reporting.
• Transportation: Facilitate fleet telematics, EV charging, autonomous and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication.
• Renewable Energy and Storage: Optimize renewable production and storage with IoT sensors and connectivity.
• Methane Leak Detection: Reduce methane leaks with sensors, video intelligence and connectivity.
• Carbon Dioxide Removal and Digital Measurement, Reporting and Verification: Support carbon removals by monitoring and optimizing performance and enabling data to prove credibility.
• New Fuel Production Manufacturing and Logistics: Utilize smart factory and transportation asset tracking for new fuels such as hydrogen and sustainable aviation fuel.

We work with The Carbon Trust to develop emissions abatement factors representing the average emissions reduction that can be achieved through these Smart Climate Solutions.

Learn more about our Gigaton Goal by viewing our progress update. To explore how we measure our impact, visit our 2025 Gigaton Methodology.

Efficiency and Emissions Governance

To ensure we’re playing our role effectively, we have assigned oversight responsibility to several internal bodies.

At Board of Directors level:

• Governance and Policy Committee (GPC): Meets throughout the year to assist the Board in overseeing our governance practices and corporate responsibility strategy, including related policies, programs and sustainability reporting. In 2024, the GPC held five regularly scheduled meetings and received information about environmental initiatives and reporting.
• Audit Committee: Oversees our internal audit of corporate responsibility reporting and integration of corporate responsibility issues into corporate ERM analysis.

At Management level:

• Chief Sustainability Officer and Senior Vice President of Corporate Responsibility: Oversees AT&T’s strategy, receiving weekly updates on cross-company activities and developments.
• Corporate Responsibility Governance Council: Led by our Chief Sustainability Officer and comprising senior executives and officers responsible for business areas most closely linked to our current corporate responsibility priorities. It meets multiple times annually and collaborates on initiatives, competencies and perspectives.
• Assistant Vice President (AVP) of Global Environmental Sustainability: Directly reports to the Chief Sustainability Officer, oversees AT&T’s environmental programming and leads our Environment Committee.
• Environmental Sustainability Team: Led by the AVP of Global Environmental Sustainability, monitors internal and external developments and communicates the most relevant issues to the Chief Sustainability Officer. The team works with business unit experts to implement and enhance programs and policies addressing environmental risks and opportunities.
• Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations: Responsible for network resilience, including energy and water use. Oversees our commitments to renewable energy procurement, energy efficiency, network disaster response and business continuity planning.
• AT&T Implementation, Provisioning and Optimization Organization: Sits in our Network Engineering and Operations organization and oversees business aspects that impact emissions, such as energy efficiency and energy conservation measures, decommissioning activities and renewable energy purchases. Other measures affecting emissions — such as our fleet — are managed within distinct departments in accordance with organizational procedures.

For more information on our oversight of these issues please visit our TCFD Report.

Robust Management and Policies

Robust policies and procedures guide how we manage risks and opportunities, including:

• The AT&T Environmental Statement, which addresses our approach to managing impacts, reducing emissions, increasing operational resilience and helping customers pursue sustainability.
• Our Climate Strategy & Transition Plan, which describes our overall approach.

To keep pace with the evolving sustainability landscape and scope of our company, we continuously revise and strengthen our GHG emissions management program in line with relevant standards, protocols and best practices. This is guided by the work we do with an integrated energy services provider to compile, analyze and produce annual emissions reports. The content and methods related to data calculation, estimation and aggregation are reviewed annually to identify improvement opportunities.

We continue to automate emissions data collection and calculations associated with our annual emissions statement. The goal is to reduce data collection and processing time, accelerate data validation and decrease the likelihood of human error.

Stakeholder Engagement

No single entity can solve the largest environmental challenges, which is why we partner with industry peers, governments, nonprofits and academia who are equally committed to creating a cleaner, more sustainable world, including:

• Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES): AT&T supported C2ES in developing a multistakeholder-led framework for business leadership on resilience. We also supported C2ES to develop and launch their Principles for Corporate Climate Resilience Leadership.
• Corporate Electric Vehicle Alliance: AT&T is a member of the Corporate Electric Vehicle Alliance to understand and support the transition to EVs across all use cases and class sizes.
• Global enabling Sustainability Initiative (GeSI): AT&T participates in GeSI projects and activities in the areas of climate, supply chain and human rights.
• Trellis Network: AT&T participates in various Trellis Network interest groups focused on strategy, circularity, transportation and logistics, and carbon markets.
• Interdependent Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment (IN-CORE): AT&T supports IN-CORE, which provides expertise in community resilience, as we grow the user base and awareness of the ClimRR portal.
• Third Derivative: AT&T works with Third Derivative to identify new technologies that could benefit from the integration of AT&T connectivity to become a Smart Climate Solution or that we could use at AT&T to help lower our operational emissions.
• University of Texas’ Center for Water and the Environment (CWE): AT&T collaborated with CWE to explore how Texas and first responders can use AT&T’s future flooding dataset to enhance readiness and risk-reduction efforts.

We are also members of trade associations that support environmental action, such as the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Tackling Our Emissions

Our ground fleet emissions accounted for 72% of our 2024 Scope 1 emissions⁸ while 87% of total operational emissions were attributable to purchased electricity. In 2024, we entered two new contracts to purchase renewable energy; we also conducted 511,470 projects to enhance energy efficiency. For more information, see our Energy Management issue brief.

Scope 1 Emissions

Scope 1 emissions account for 3.8% of our total reported emissions and 12.6% of our total operational emissions. ⁹

Throughout the year, we maintained our focus on building capacity to support a larger EV fleet. In California — where new Advanced Clean Fleets regulation requires that at least 10% of fleet vehicles be zero-emission or near-zero-emission vehicles — two AT&T sites are currently under development to become hubs for infrastructure that will support future expansion of our EV fleet.

In 2024, Scope 3 emissions represented 70% of our total footprint. Our Scope 3 emissions decreased by 7.5% from 2023 to 2024. The most impactful reductions can be seen in Purchased Goods & Services and Capital Goods, which despite stability in spend, emissions reduced due to the efforts of our suppliers to reduce their emissions and reductions in EEIO emissions factors. Emissions related to Transportation and Distribution also saw significant reductions due to a sharp decrease in the EPA’s emission factor related to trucking in the United States. Some of the reduction of Scope 3 was counteracted by an increase in emissions related to Waste Generated in Operations and Employee Commuting. Waste overall increased due to AT&T’s significant investment in our national fiber footprint and decommissioning of older network elements, while Employee Commuting increased due to using more accurate data regarding commutes rather than state-level averages.

Explore our emissions data in more detail in our corporate responsibility KPI webpage.

Delivering More Smart Climate Solutions

By the end of 2024, we had identified 31 Smart Climate Solutions and calculated the emissions reductions each can support. These solutions have already enabled emissions reductions of 227.2 million metric tons of CO₂e — 23% of our Gigaton Goal.

Collaborating on Carbon Removal

In March 2024, we announced an agreement with 1PointFive — a carbon removal company — to purchase CO₂ removal credits from their first large-scale Direct Air Capture (DAC) facility. Known as STRATOS and set to be the largest facility of its kind in the world, the site is designed to capture up to 500,000 metric tons of CO₂ annually when fully operational.

To further support this work, we are providing fiber connectivity which will enable 1PointFive to monitor and optimize the facility.

Fueling Collective Action

We’re continuously amplifying ClimRR’s scope, incorporating new data layers on pluvial flood projections.

To support forward-looking data being incorporated into hazard mitigation plans, during 2024, we also piloted the Climate Resilient Communities Initiative. Through the initiative, participating regions receive assistance from AT&T, Argonne National Laboratory and IN-CORE to apply ClimRR insights to hazard mitigation and resilience plans and to understand potential local impacts of extreme heat, flooding, dangerous fire weather conditions or drought. By doing so, local agencies are empowered to proactively protect vulnerable members of their communities. For example, in New York, Albany County is analyzing potential future hazards such as more frequent and intense snowstorms that could raise maintenance costs and storm disruptions. ClimRR data also helped the county identify areas at heightened risk of significant precipitation and landslides. By gaining these insights, Albany County can better target priority areas for risk-mitigation solutions.

During 2024, we were honored to be recognized as the winner of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Citizens Award in the category “Best Community Resilience and Disaster Response Program” for the ClimRR portal and our Network Disaster Recovery efforts. We are also proud to have been frequently recognized by C2ES for ClimRR. We were also recognized as Champion Winner of the Top Sustainability Initiative at the 2024 Digital Engineering Awards for both the portal and our Climate Resilient Communities Initiative.

Learn how we’re further leveraging data to enhance our understanding of heat-related human impacts in our Environment, Health & Safety Compliance issue brief.