Reducing Our Footprint

Taking climate action

We are committed to achieving a low-carbon future.

Responsible Company

Becoming a sustainability leader

Environmental Sustainability

Making a difference through climate action

Eco Action

Applying our skills to help the environment

Innovation Challenge

Innovating for people and the planet

360° Value Reporting

All reporting in one place

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Our goals and commitments

We’ve committed to achieve net-zero emissions by 2025, focusing first on actual reductions across our Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. To do this, we’ll:

Plan to meet our office energy needs with 100% renewable electricity by 2023 and equip our people to make climate-smart travel decisions.
Require 90% of our key suppliers* to disclose their environmental targets and actions being taken to reduce emissions by 2025.
Address remaining emissions by investing in nature-based carbon removal solutions that will directly remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Move to zero waste

We’ll reuse or recycle 100% of our e-waste, such as computers and servers, as well as all our office furniture, by 2025.
Post-pandemic, we’re committed to eliminating single-use plastics in our locations.

Plan for water risk

We’re developing plans to reduce the impact of flooding, drought and water scarcity on our business and our people in high-risk areas.
We’re also measuring and reducing water use in these locations.

*Key suppliers are defined as vendors that represent a significant portion of our 2019 Scope 3 emissions.

Renewable electricity

We have a clear approach to reach our goal of 100% renewable electricity by 2023, and as part of this, we are reducing the amount of non-renewable energy that we use.

Because we do not own our office buildings, and procure most of our energy from the grid, our plans are not heavily focused on on-site renewable generation, rather, we are engaging market-based renewable electricity purchase opportunities.

In locations where energy is purchased on our behalf, we are collaborating with building management and others to improve our renewable electricity mix. We also continue to drive energy efficiency, expanding our use of smart meters to inform our energy management decisions.

At the end of fiscal 2021, our mix of renewable electricity reached 53%, an improvement from 30% in fiscal 2020. We continue our progress to power our locations with 100% renewable electricity, reducing the amount of non-renewable energy we use each year.

Green IT

Accenture’s global IT organization takes a cloud-first approach to the way we operate, develop new applications and innovate to run our business.

Our first major step was to move Accenture applications from data centers to the public cloud.

Now that our journey to cloud is complete, we have a direct advantage of consuming the new, more sustainable capabilities from cloud providers. As they deploy these new sustainable capabilities, by being in the cloud already, we can consume them much faster. By fully being in the cloud, we can truly pivot to using the cloud through a consumption-based model where we manage our computing needs through just-in-time computing and optimize our footprint constantly to serve Accenture.

Working toward our science-based target

Through our science-based target, by 2025 we aim to reduce our absolute greenhouse gas emissions by 11%, our Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 65%, and our Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions per unit of revenue intensity by 40% from our baseline in 2016.

Our progress against these goals in 2021:

Total emissions—reflecting continued impacts from the pandemic—decreased by 65% from our baseline, exceeding one aspect of our 2025 target.
Scope 1 and 2 were reduced by 72%.
Total emissions per unit of revenue were reduced by 76%.