Biodiversity and Emissions Impact
Net-Zero Emissions
Understanding Akamai’s Biodiversity Impact and Challenges
Akamai recognizes the crucial importance of addressing biodiversity as part of our environmental impact, and integrating nature-positive practices across our operations and emissions reduction activities. As part of Akamai’s environmental management system (EMS), our alignment with ISO 14001, we are regularly evaluating the company’s environmental aspects and impacts to inform our targets and initiatives.
Akamai’s environmental aspects related to biodiversity include:
- Consuming power across our global operations
- Purchasing and disposing of hardware
- Housing, maintaining, and operating our network equipment
Although we do not manufacture the hardware used across our platform and our operations are currently primarily in multi-tenant data center spaces, we recognize the potential for future expansion into wholly operated and owned data center environments. Regardless of the operational model, we aspire to make a tangible impact in mitigating biodiversity impacts as we work toward a decarbonized future. Through collaboration, innovation, and strategic initiatives, we aim to address environmental challenges while continuing to grow responsibly.
The repercussions on biodiversity are varied and could manifest in unpredictable ways on a global scale for ecosystems, public health, infrastructure, and our operations. This interconnected challenge is compounded by the impacts of climate change, where higher Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios lead to more frequent and severe risks to our supply chain and the communities in which we live, work, and serve. Aligning our strategies with ambitious pathways like RCP 1.9 or 2.6, which limits global warming to 1.5°C, is essential to mitigating these effects and achieving long-term resilience.
Our Nature-Positive Practices
We are embracing nature-positive practices and decarbonization activities across our value chain, with a focus on renewable energy usage, sustainable waste management, and partnership with environmentally responsible suppliers.
Energy Use
We are prioritizing our efforts to power our data centers and offices with 100% renewable energy sources to reduce the emissions footprint and associated impacts on biodiversity. We strive to implement energy efficiency measures to minimize resource use.
Waste Management
We ensure the adoption of sustainable waste management practices such as e-Stewards, including recycling 100% of our electronic waste and materials, to prevent pollution and habitat degradation.
Supplier Engagement
Through our supplier engagement programs, we embed biodiversity into the planning of new build data centers by selecting sites with low ecological sensitivity and sourcing from partners who align with environmental responsibility.
To guide our endeavors in safeguarding and enriching biodiversity, we have developed a biodiversity policy, which we will consistently review and enhance to align with progressive practices, our EMS, and our global sustainability objectives. We will continue to report comprehensively on progress toward our objectives and our environmental risk and opportunity management, expanding focus to include interconnected risks and opportunities, such as biodiversity, as we transition in the future to align with the IFRS S1 and S2 guidance.
Quantifying Health and Ecosystem Benefits of Renewable Energy
We recognize that the impact potential of renewable energy project investment goes beyond delivering clean electrons to the grid. In 2024, Akamai partnered with Quantum Energy to analyze the grid-level changes in generation due to the electricity produced by Akamai’s wind and solar projects in the U.S. and the avoided emissions to air, soil, marine, and freshwater, which are mapped to epidemiological damage pathways to assess public health and ecosystem impacts. The location of new clean energy projects can be optimized to avoid carbon, terrestrial acidification, freshwater eutrophication, photochemical oxidants (ecosystems), land saved by reduced fuel extraction, water depletion, terrestrial ecotoxicity, and freshwater ecotoxicity, among other factors, to increase biodiversity benefits as a result. We are proud to highlight that 0.41 species were saved, measured using the industry-standard Potentially Disappeared Fraction of Species metric, as a result of Akamai’s 2024 renewable energy portfolio impact.
Making impact-driven and holistic sustainability progress is crucial for Akamai’s long-term business resilience, and for the health of our planet and the interconnected ecosystems, species, and people that inhabit it.