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US telecommunications giant AT&T is committed to helping business customers avoid at least one billion tons – one gigaton – of greenhouse gas emissions by 2035.

A gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions is roughly 100 times the emissions generated by AT&T; According to the latest sustainability report, the company’s global GHG footprint was 10.42 million tons across all divisions in 2019-2020.

AT&T forges a number of partnerships to help reduce emissions and call this work the Connected Climate Initiative. The initiative’s business members include major utility Duke Energy, digital infrastructure provider Equinix, and tech giant Microsoft, which has its own goal of achieving negative emissions by 2030 and eliminating the company’s historic emissions by 2050.

Key areas for reducing emissions will be providing companies with smart technologies that help them improve energy and material efficiency – for example, providing artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to companies in high-emitting sectors such as transport and energy. AT&T also emphasizes the role broadband technologies, including 5G, can play in improving energy efficiency.

AT&T has stated that it will work with universities and nonprofits, as well as its business customers, to evaluate which solutions are most effective and to develop and scale new products and services. Universities that have already been announced as members of the Connected Climate Initiative are Texas A&M University and the University of Missouri.

“Now is the time to expand our influence by developing and deploying more skills and solutions that enable companies to reduce their environmental footprint,” said Anne Chow, CEO of AT&T Business. “This is a collective imperative for all businesses that also benefits the planet and society as a whole.”

AT&T began measuring the emissions of its business customers for the first time in 2018 as part of a partnership with the Carbon Trust – and the completed, ongoing and further potentials for emissions reduction made possible by its solutions. Around 72 million tons of CO2e emissions were avoided within two years.

The 2035 commitment has a baseline of 2018, which means that the reductions achieved over the past three years are taken into account.

The obligation of companies to reduce or eliminate more emissions than those produced is becoming more common.

This spring, impact investor and consultancy Anthesis committed to supporting projects that will avoid, reduce, and remove a total of three billion tonnes (three gigatons) of carbon by the end of the decade.

Similar commitments have been made by Walmart, which aims to help suppliers cut a gigatonne of emissions by 2030, and Capgemini, which is committed to helping customers cut their emissions by 500,000 tonnes of CO2e by 2030. That number is 20 times higher than the company’s own annual global climate footprint.

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Sarah George