Our Climate Commitment 

Our Climate Commitment 

Our 2030 climate ambition is primarily focused on implementing effective carbon reduction and emission avoidance practices based on an accurate carbon footprint baseline year calculation. This includes continuing to measure our impact and reducing the carbon footprint of our business activities while using our unique expertise to help our customers manage their own environmental impact.

Climate Change - Risks and Opportunities

As companies, governing bodies, and the wider community become more conscious of the environmental impact of their operations, they will rely upon technology providers for sustainable solutions. SoftwareOne along with our partners are responsible for creating a more sustainable market, with solutions that will require minimal raw materials. Although it is not within our direct responsibility, we acknowledge that data centres in our industry generate a high amount of carbon emissions. In the years leading up to 2030 and beyond, these emissions are expected to reduce due to widespread investment.

Climate change brings a host of risks to software companies and society alike. Material long-term climate change risks to SoftwareOne, to its employees and its facilities could include, [but are not limited to]:

• Increased costs of energy

• Higher insurance premiums

• Increased costs of travel

• Increased need for cooling of datacentres/increased water usage by suppliers for cooling

• Increased regulatory pressure for carbon reductions by governments

• Damage to infrastructure due to natural disasters/climate events

• Relocation of employees

• Increased demands on our clients to select more environmentally friendly providers

As part of our ongoing ESG risk assessment, these risks are periodically reviewed and shared by the ESG team along with ongoing actions, mitigations and areas of potential concern for SoftwareOne’s business operations. Despite the risks, SoftwareOne’s ethos is to turn any risk into an opportunity, and climate change is no exception.

Carbon Footprint

In 2021 we began calculating our carbon footprint at a global level. While many countries and regions, such as DACH and the UK, began collecting their data earlier, it was a key initiative for us to begin the challenging task of collecting this data globally. An accurate carbon footprint allows us to reduce our emissions within our organisation, in terms of location, scope and activity.

Emissions across our value chain

SoftwareOne aligns itself with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol where emissions are classified based on where they occur in the value chain. While we can control our scope 1 and 2 emissions from company-owned and rented cars and offices, most emissions occur in our scope 3 which we have little control. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol scope 3 accounting standards provides limited guidance on how to address these emissions, especially for those companies in a unique position such as ourselves. Due to the nature of our business, we do not transport and distribute finished goods. However, these emissions are largely attributed to the sold software licenses and cloud-based solutions which are created and powered by our suppliers. Business travel and our employees’ commuting also contribute to our upstream scope 3 emissions.

Our carbon footprint calculation involved volunteers from each of the 90 SoftwareOne subsidiaries. To calculate their carbon footprint, these volunteers collaborated across the various internal departments and gathered their activity and spend-based data from their country. This data was collated and verified by  our third party carbon footprint platform which  uses a wide range of emissions factors in these calculations.

Due to the global pandemic in 2020 and 2021, our carbon footprint increased under all 3 scopes in 2022. As such, our 2021 data is not an accurate representation of our baseline carbon footprint. Therefore, we will use 2022 as our baseline year.

Carbon Reduction Strategy

It is important for us to establish a localised approach to our climate commitment strategy; allowing each country to focus on carbon reduction initiatives that directly align to where the data demonstrates the highest carbon impact. We have created a centralised committee, budget and process, to enable and support our employees to reduce their carbon footprint in their country. Some local initiatives within our company have already had measured success. SEE DACH GREEN TEAM.

While we remain engaged with our suppliers regarding their emissions, our efforts are concentrated on reducing our scope 1 and 2 emissions as well as those from business travel (scope 3) through targeted initiatives that are within our control.

Green Offices

Our offices in all 90 countries consist of both rented and owned buildings with the majority being rented  locations.  The emissions associated with energy used for heating, cooling and electricity in our offices account for 16.53% of our scope 1 and 2 emissions. Within our owned office buildings, we are committed to creating sustainable and energy- efficient workplaces and, where possible, making use of renewable energy suppliers. Although we have less control over energy suppliers in our rented buildings, we encourage our subsidiaries to rent offices that are energy efficient and we promote energy reduction initiatives such as LED and PIR[1] lighting.

Waste management and recycling projects are an integral part of our ESG programme. As we do not manufacture goods, we do not generate packaging or hazardous waste. However, SoftwareOne commits to reducing the volume of waste generated by all our offices, by implementing effective waste management and recycling practices. In the future, to standardise our efforts across our company, we will set global targets for this area of concern and  include best waste management practices in our environmental policy.

[1] Passive infrared sensor

Fleet and commuting

Our company cars account for a large proportion of our scope 1 and 2 emissions and is of the highest priority for our carbon reduction strategy. We take a country-by-country approach to reducing our fleet-based emissions. Regional differences in infrastructure and resources across SoftwareOne demand an innovative, customized approach. To reduce our employees commuting emissions, many countries already encourage low emission travel such as cycling and use of public transport but in countries where employees need to travel by car, we have car sharing and EV schemes. This initiative has been very successful in the DACH region and the UK is following quickly in their footsteps as they aim to launch their own EV scheme in the first half of 2023.

Business travel

SoftwareOne is a people-centric business and client meetings are an important part of building business relationships. Business travel emissions account for 13% of our scope 3, and is therefore an important part of our carbon reduction strategy. We encourage our employees to make mindful travel decisions by being aware of the emissions associated with their mode of travel and by selecting train travel where possible or choosing economy class over business class travel. While we are in the process of creating a global approach to business travel, some local teams have already taken the initiative to drive policies on this topic. For example, our Acquisitions and Integrations team have set guidelines for their teams to take the train for journeys less than five hours (or below 500km), and to choose rail over air travel where possible.

Impact financing

SoftwareOne’s ESG team has confidence in our ESG strategies and is actively pursuing new methods to reduce our carbon footprint. Therefore, we want to make a commitment to only consider forms of carbon offsetting as a last resort.

While we want to do our best to implement effective carbon reduction strategies that have tangible results within SoftwareOne and our communities, we do not want to pass up on the opportunity to invest in external projects that we believe can have a positive impact on the future of our planet.

Impact financing may be a viable way to invest in sustainable projects such as renewable energy, carbon capture, healthcare and education, taking the focus away from ‘offsetting’ and moving it towards investing in carbon projects at early stages.

Cutting Downstream Emissions

Cloud Sustainability

Cloud Sustainability is a central initiative to our ‘Cutting Downstream Emissions’ ambition which aims to support our customers own sustainability and ESG journeys by providing accurate and specific emissions data for their cloud solutions.

Cloud Sustainability provides our customers with the carbon footprint of each cloud solution and application service, enabling them to reduce their Scope 3 emissions.

Similar to FinOps, Cloud Sustainability aims to reduce the environmental impact of digital technologies and operations. While FinOps enables customers to manage their software and cloud spend, Cloud Sustainability takes a broader approach by considering the environmental impact of software development and operations.

Both FinOps and Cloud Sustainability aim to optimize the use of resources to reduce waste and increase efficiency. While FinOps focuses on cloud resource optimization, Cloud Sustainability looks at resource optimization across the entire software development and operations lifecycle.

Cloud Sustainability emphasizes the use of energy-efficient technologies and practices in software development and operations. Not only does it demonstrate deep-rooted commitment but it sets a benchmark within our market for how downstream emissions can be reduced. With extensive resources at our disposal, we are making a significant contribution to our market sector.

Cloud Sustainability shows SoftwareOne’s commitment to supporting our customers in achieving their own ESG goals and ambitions.

At SoftwareOne we intend to implement ‘Cloud Sustainability’ for our own purposes; by using the data provided by publishers to help calculate more accurate information on our own carbon footprint.

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