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A message from Akamai President & Chief Executive Officer Paul Sagan
The Information Communications Technology (ICT) industry – the large and rapidly expanding sector in which we operate our businesses – must play a key role in building a more sustainable world by driving efficiencies across industries and around the globe.
Last year Akamai publicly launched its Sustainability Initiative with a primary focus of measuring and mitigating the environmental impact of our business operations. Our network operations represent more than 90% of our overall environmental (or carbon) footprint, highlighting the importance of our focus on network energy and carbon efficiency. Akamai's customers leverage our shared, distributed cloud platform to facilitate the dematerialization of traditional bricks and mortar activities as these activities move to the Internet driving dramatic efficiencies across industries and around the globe. Our challenge is that this rapid adoption of the Internet fuels our network growth and concomitant environmental impacts. Since 2009 our network traffic nearly quadrupled accompanied by a 33% increase in absolute carbon emissions.
To offset the environmental impacts of this rapid growth we continue to make significant progress in the area of energy and carbon intensity reductions. Since 20091 aggressive improvements in hardware and code efficiency have resulted in a 57% reduction in energy consumption and carbon emissions relative to network traffic. Our innovative work in the area of code efficiency was recognized last year by the Uptime Institute. These gains represent 160,000 metric tons in avoided CO2e emissions, the equivalent of the annual emissions of 30,500 U.S. automobiles. With additional hardware and software efficiency projects on the 2011 roadmap we are targeting a similar level of annual intensity reductions.
Beyond our focus on network carbon efficiency our Sustainability Initiative also encompasses responsible electronic–waste management, and material and energy efficiency projects in our corporate environment. In 2011 we will launch new tools to aid our customers in their own carbon management programs.
As a demonstration of our commitment to carbon management and transparency Akamai completed its inaugural response to the Carbon Disclosure Project. You can access our report here.The CDP recognized our efforts in its Carbon Disclosure Leadership Index achieving a score of 82/100. Akamai was also recognized by the New England Clean Energy Council with the Corporate Citizen of the Year award for our sustainability efforts and achievements.
We've been leading the Internet Revolution for more than 10 years. We are proud to take a leadership role in measuring and minimizing the environmental impact of our business operations, and sharing the financial and social benefits of sustainability with our customers. In short, we believe being green is good for the environment and good for business – both ours and yours. I hope you'll join us in our commitment.
Thank You
Paul Sagan
President & Chief Executive Officer
1 The Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard is used for Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions associated with Akamai's leased offices. A proxy method was used to estimate the electricity consumption associated with Akamai's network servers hosted in third party data centers. This method is described in more detail at www.akamai.com/sustainability/methodology.
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