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Environmental Sustainability

Environmental Sustainability

Owned by Meghan Healy
Last updated: Nov 06, 2024

ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY: CURRENT STATUS

As ICANN's mission concerns the global Internet and the public interest, a commitment to environmental, social, and governance sustainability is in the public's interest. In June 2024, ICANN delivered a comprehensive approach for implementing an environmental sustainability strategy for ICANN. (See below for deliverables.) 


A mailing list has been created for interested ICANN community, Board, and org members to share best practices and resources and foster discussions around the topic of environmental sustainability. To subscribe to sustainabilitylist@icann.org, please click here. 


BACKGROUND

Global environmental concerns have prompted discussions among ICANN's Board, community and org about ICANN's role and responsibility in understanding and addressing its own ecological footprint. In 2023, the ICANN Board began developing a plan to delve deeper into this issue as part of its role in overseeing ICANN's Strategic Planning efforts. Additionally, the Board asked ICANN's CEO to explore the issue, leading to CEO goal 8.


PRINCIPLES 

Innovation in Sustainable Operations

Pursue innovative solutions to reduce environmental impact across ICANN's business operations

Collaborative Engagement

Establish and foster partnerships and collaborations for environmental sustainability efforts across the ICANN ecosystem

Empower employees, partners, and vendors through policies and practices to prioritize sustainable sourcing

Transparency and Accountability

Maintain transparency in reporting environmental impacts and ensure accountability for contributions to sustainability


DELIVERABLES

  • Best practices research in environmental sustainability practices - Best Practices - PDF (May 2024)
  • Proposed scope for the environmental audit to understand baseline - Scope - PDF (May 2024)
  • Overall strategy, vision, principles, and proposed activities - Strategy - PDF (May 2024)


SCOPE

Best practices research on environmental sustainability practices focuses on four categories, with further sub-categories:

  • Offices, servers, and colocation facilities: office building systems (heating, cooling, automations), lighting, energy providers/sources, waster and water, sustainable commuting and telecommuting, data center management
  • Travel: low-carbon travel, flights
  • Events: event materials, catering, low-carbon accommodation, community engagement
  • Org-wide products/purchases: plastic and single-use items, IT equipment and services, supply chain


Preliminary research suggests that the proposed environmental audit may explore some of the following lines of inquiry:

  • Offices: What lighting products are currently being used? Are LED light bulbs an option? What would need to be retrofitted to make it possible, if not? 
  • Travel: Are staff encouraged to use trains for long-distance trips and public transportation for short trips, where feasible? 
  • Events: Do we encourage vendors to use sustainable practices? (For example, could we ask them to avoid single-use beverage packaging and single-use plastics for beverages?)
  • Org-wide products/purchases: Do we regularly seek out eco-friendly materials? Are our signage, badges, and banners made of eco-friendly materials? 


RESOURCES


ADDITIONAL COMMUNITY RESOURCES


CONTACT