Align our practices to support environmental sustainability
Increasing the Sustainability of Our Movement includes building a movement that supports environmental sustainability. Wikimedia can only be truly sustainable if its activities and practices support the sustainability of the planet and its environment. Some specific examples of activities of this Initiative include: banning plastic waste at Wikimedia events and creating policies to limit the carbon footprint of the Wikimedia activities.
- While we grow and become more sustainable as a Movement, we will also align our practices to support the environmental sustainability of our planet.
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Hi, we have prepared a report summarizing strategic data and activities related to the recommendation Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement, focusing on projects led by the Wikimedia Foundation. It includes a section about this initiative that I’m copying here for convenience and automatic translations.
Implementing this initiative requires all Movement stakeholders to support the sustainability of our planet as we work on our sustainability as a movement.
Since 2018, the Wikimedia Foundation has published an annual Environmental Sustainability Report. According to the last edition, corresponding to 2022, the Wikimedia Foundation’s carbon emissions totaled 2,955 metric tons of CO2-equivalent – less than 1% of other top 10 website platforms like Google and Meta. For the first time, the 2022 report included the estimated emissions of the Foundation’s remote workforce. This change in the calculation increased our estimated emissions compared with previous years’ estimations.
The report also mentions that 74% of our total data center electricity usage is covered by renewable energy sources (up from 68% in 2021, and less than 10% in 2018). All but one of our data center vendors cover 100% of their energy usage with renewable energy sources, and the remaining vendor is progressing towards its goal of 100% renewable energy. In 2022, travel-related emissions were 25% below 2019 levels (our last full year of travel before the COVID-19 pandemic), even though the Foundation increased its staff from 445 to 711.
More comparative data between 2018 and 2022 is available on the Wikimedia Foundation Sustainability Metrics.
In 2022, an Internal Carbon Fund was established through a US$50/ton internal fee, or “tax”, on our annual emissions. In 2023, six community projects focusing on environmental sustainability were funded in the context of the first Organizer Lab (beta).
