The Green Web Foundation is a non profit organisation with a goal of us reaching a fossil free internet by 2030, so seeing which companies are taking climate seriously is helpful to this end.
If you use the web, you might be interested personally, and if you wanted to know who to ask to move faster, that would be nice too, yes?
You can think of Net Zero targets as one indicator of how seriously an organization with significant resources is taking climate change, but the quality of the target, and the corresponding plans for action are also important.
The Green Web Foundation blog goes into some more detail, but the short version is that if there is no action, or at least an interim target to go with a net zero in the short term, it’s a sign that an organisation is not taking climate change as seriously as it should be.
Here’s the guidance from the well respected New Climate Institute, on what to look for. It’s taken from their annual corporate sustainability monitor report, and there is a clear methodology document too if you want more detail.
The internet is a massive network that is made of literally millions of machines, but over time, it has grown more concentrated. In 2023, a relatively small number of organisations have control over huge parts of it.
There are downsides to the concentration of power, but on the bright side if you know which of those organisations are moving fast or slow on climate, it helps inform policy makers, civil society, and their customer.
Also getting well-resourced organisations who can move faster to actually move faster represents a significant win, over getting the same number of small companies to do the same, simply because they have so much money and power. Together tech companies Microsoft, Amazon and Google, were responsible for nearly 30% of all renewable energy power purchase agreements between 2013 and 2022, but this only covers a fraction of the actual hours of use by their datacentres.
This list is based on the Cisco Umbrella dataset - a list of the top million queries domains. For each domain, we manually linked to the corresponding reporting organisation on Wikirate and on Wikipedia with this spreadsheet.