Collaboration
Collaborating with technology leaders to bring to market new scaled product offerings that enable business progress and emissions reduction.
Reducing Emissions through Connectivity
Connectivity powers our world. It propels growth, innovation, and societal progress. AT&T is harnessing the power of our connectivity to help our business customers reduce emissions at scale.
Our Goal
Climate change is one of the most pressing global challenges. AT&T’s commitment to be carbon neutral across our global operations by 2035 demonstrates our intention to contribute to addressing this crisis by reducing our own emissions, but we’re not stopping there. Since 2015, we have been working with business customers and nonprofits to drive broadband-enabled solutions that help reduce emissions contributing to climate change. We’ve set a goal to develop connectivity solutions that help our customers collectively reduce a gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. We’re focusing on sectors that currently have large carbon footprints, including manufacturing, energy, and transportation.
What is a Gigaton?
One billion metric tons
Connected Climate Initiative
Meeting global climate goals requires immense cooperation. AT&T is applying its global reach, resources and scale to form the Connected Climate Initiative. Through the Connected Climate Initiative, we are focused on:
Research
Investing in research with leading universities to explore how 5G can enable emissions reductions in key areas like transportation, energy and manufacturing.
Solutions
Delivering connectivity-driven solutions to help our AT&T Business customers reduce emissions.
Disruption
Fueling innovation and disruptive technologies that use connectivity to fundamentally change how work gets done.
AT&T’s Connected Climate Initiative includes a collection of climate leaders working to unleash the power of connectivity solutions including IoT, 5G and edge computing to reduce emissions.
Learn about the universities, businesses, and nonprofits we’re working with
Measuring Progress to Gigaton
To ensure methodological rigor in tracking progress against our goal, we worked with the Carbon Trust, a leading environmental NGO, to develop a methodology for measuring emissions reductions enabled by our connectivity. We will provide an update on our progress annually as part of our ESG reporting.
We started calculating the emissions reduction that AT&T helps enable in 2018. At the end of 2020, we calculated that our technology solutions cumulatively have helped enable 72 million metric tons of CO2e, which is equivalent to over 8.1 billion gallons of gasoline, per the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This amount only represents the solutions that we’ve been able to identify and quantify, so there likely are more examples that we’ve been unable to count so far. We’re committed to working with our customers to quantify more of these impacts as we look to help increase the rate of emissions reduction.
We recognize that it’s very important to be transparent as we measure our impact in this area, so we’ve created several documents to show how we make those calculations. Here is the archive of those documents:
Helping customers reduce emissions
Connectivity can help lower emissions and curb resource use in many ways. Our case studies highlight some of the sectors and situations where connected solutions create more sustainable approaches to business.
