F5’s First Climate Target
Since F5 formed the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) team in late 2020, our focus has been on bringing the environmental program at the company up to the standards we’re proud to have set over the last 25+ years in social and governance.
Nowhere was that work more urgent than in collecting and assessing the environmental data across F5 to chart a clear path toward climate action. Because while F5 has long met its environmental obligations when it comes to our hardware and products, there has never been a dedicated strategy to reduce our operations carbon footprint.
The result today is F5’s first step toward a climate target, by committing to reduce our absolute Scope 1 and 2 emissions 50% by 2030 from a 2021 baseline year. Over the next year, we will complete our Scope 3 emissions inventory across our value chain, in order to issue our complete science-based target.
We intend to meet this target by taking advantage of renewable energy, and what remains will come from improvements in our offices’ energy efficiency. You can see from our most recent ESG report that the Scope 1 emissions associated with our offices around the world represents a small portion of our emissions, and it is our energy consumption in Scope 2 where we have the most room for improvement.
To start taking immediate action on our target, F5 made its first-ever purchase of renewable energy certificates (RECs) in 2022. We focused on buying renewable energy in the Western region of the U.S. first, given that our highest volume of emissions worldwide is currently concentrated around our headquarters in Seattle and offices in the Bay Area.
Setting a climate target is painstaking work for any organization, but it is more than just an exercise in number-crunching—it is also an expression of company culture. And it is a responsibility we've approached with great care, knowing that the path we set from 2021 is a reflection of our guiding principle to Do the Right Thing, and our achievement of the target in 2030 will rely most on the behaviors and principles that make up F5’s uniquely human-first and high-performance culture.
That means our commitment also includes sharing our annual progress toward our target, which will be included every year in our ESG reports. We expect that some years we will do better than others, and any updates from the Science-based Target initiative (SBTi) may mean we need to adjust our course, but the end goal remains the same: F5’s Scope 1 and 2 emissions will be cut in half by 2030.
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By Katherine Clouse, Senior Director, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), F5