Sustainability

This page is a portal to information about the environmental sustainability status and efforts at the Wikimedia Foundation, including the Wikimedia projects, with additional information about the communities that participate in the projects.

Sustainability at the Wikimedia Foundation

Since 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation has been committed to conducting an annual greenhouse gas inventory, to assess the impacts of its data center sites, business travel program, and employees’ day to day working environments (e.g., the San Francisco, USA office, commuting, and remote employees’ estimated home energy use). Our inventory is developed according to the WRI/WBCSD Greenhouse Gas Protocol and includes our scope 1, scope 2, and all of our relevant scope 3 emissions, as defined below:

Scope 1: Direct greenhouse gas emissions that occur from sources controlled or owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. This includes natural gas and refrigerant consumption at our San Francisco office.
Scope 2: Indirect emissions associated with the purchase of electricity, steam, heat, or cooling. This includes electricity and steam used at the San Francisco office.
Scope 3: Indirect emissions resulting from activities from assets not owned or controlled by the Wikimedia Foundation, but that we indirectly impact through our operations. Scope 3 emissions include all sources not within our scope 1 and 2 boundary. These include water usage and waste (landfill, recycling, compost) at the San Francisco office; electricity used by our data center vendors across the globe; WMF-sponsored staff and volunteer business travel; commuting; and as of 2022, energy related to remote work.

Recent improvements in reporting

As part of our commitment to sustainability, we are continually looking for ways to better capture our environmental impact and to improve the accuracy of our reporting. Notable changes since 2019 include:

Updating our data center emissions methodology in 2021 to reflect the emission factors of the grids where our data centers operate rather than the procurement decisions of our vendors (i.e., PPAs, RECs). This resulted in a 75% increase in data center-related emissions between 2020 and 2021. Please see our 2021 report for more information.
Expanding our scope 3 emissions in 2022 to include remote work impacts (e.g., remote employees’ estimated home energy use and their commutes to alternative workspaces), which increased our emissions by 505 mtCO2e in that year.
Looking Ahead: Our scope 3 emissions for calendar year 2024 will be expanded to include the travel emissions associated with our conference grants portfolio. Previously, we were only able to include travel emissions of the WMF staff who traveled to these events, but as the Foundation's Travel Team is taking a more active role in booking travel/accommodation for scholarship attendees, we will have access to this data for the first time ever.

Emissions Data

Emissions (mtCO₂e)	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023
Scope 1	2.81	2.18	0.47	0.47	0.63	0.66
Scope 2	details not available	86.44	57.23	15.73	16.26	18.97
Scope 3	details not available	2,344.72	1,111.74	1,074.18	2,914.35	3,926.38

Total Emissions	2,867.86	2,433.34	1,169.44	1,090.38	2,931.24	3,946.01

For a more detailed look at our emissions, methodology, and source data over time, please see our reports.

Contextualizing the Current Numbers

In 2023, our scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions totaled 3,946 metric tons of CO₂-equivalent. Year-over-year, our scope 1 and 2 emissions remained static, while our scope 3 emissions increased by approximately 1,000 mtCO₂-e, or 35%. This change was driven by increased travel to community convenings compared to 2022. In 2023, we saw the return of an in-person Wikimania and Wikimedia Hackathon, events for which the Foundation sponsors both scholar and staff travel. In 2023, Wikimania was held in the ESEAP region for the first time in ten years, which significantly increased our air mileage. Staff travel to internal offsites and business meetings remained more or less the same year-over-year, as we continue to incorporate learnings from the pandemic and act more intentionally when deciding to meet in person. Our data center emissions, the second largest source of emissions next to business travel, increased slightly in 2023, in line with expected annual data center growth.

Intensity Metrics


Functional Area		2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023
Climate Content₁	Pageviews	not available	not available	not available	324M	346M	340M
Climate Content₁	Articles	not available	not available	not available	26,000	30,853	35,318
Office Emissions	tCO₂e office related (facility/operation activities)	1.70 per SF-based staff	1.62 per SF-based staff	0.77 per SF-based staff (see note 2)	n/a due to limited use of San Francisco Offsite
Travel Emissions₂	tCO₂e from internal staff convenings/employee	not available	1.84	n/a-covid	n/a-covid	1.33	1.40
Data Centers Emissions	kgCO₂e / 1M pageviews₃	5.63	3.05	2.29	4.05	4.18	4.60
Data Centers Emissions	kWh / 1M pageviews₃	13.55	12.41	11.26	11.86	13.54	14.37

Climate Change Pageviews were calculated on all articles in English Wikipedia belonging to WikiProject Climate change and their corresponding articles in all other language-versions of Wikipedia via its Wikidata item. This includes pageviews from all redirect-pages of an article.
Previous intensity metrics have been restated here as travel emissions (from internal staff convenings) per employee. Internal Staff Convenings help us support a distributed workforce and include travel to internally-facing events such as All Hands, team offsites, onboarding sessions, and office visits.
On all Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia.

Reports

Wikimedia Foundation Environmental Sustainability Metrics 2023 • 2023 Year in Review Diff post

Wikimedia Foundation Environmental Sustainability Report 2022

Wikimedia Foundation Environmental Sustainability (Carbon Footprint) Report for 2021

2020 Wikimedia Foundation Carbon Footprint report

Wikimedia Foundation 2019 Annual Carbon Footprint Report

Wikimedia Foundation 2018 Sustainability Assessment and Carbon Footprint

Wikimedia Foundation sustainability timeline: reports, resolutions and more

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

Wikimedia Foundation Data Center Supplementary information

This data was collected by Strategic Sustainability Consulting during 2020 and 2021 for the Foundation's annual carbon footprint report research.

Words from Wikimedia affiliates

See Wikimedia Affiliates Environmental Sustainability Covenant.

Facts from Wikimedia affiliates

Direct energy usage

In 2016, Wikimedia Italia was the first known Wikimedia entity to switch to 100 % renewable electricity usage for its office. See Wikimedia offices for more information.

Carbon divestment

In 2018, Wikimedia Italia was the known first Wikimedia entity to adopt a sustainable financial investment policy. Implementation started in 2019 and was reversed by a new board in January 2021 (information not yet official pending up to date financial reports).

Scope 3 emissions

Little information is available on scope 3 emissions caused by chapter activities.

Chapter meetings are often arranged to maximise the usage of public transportation, but some geographies are more challenging than others. Local work, such as photo documentation of remote places, may necessarily entail some level of fossil-powered travel.

Value-driven tooling can improve sustainability even while keeping activities largely the same. Some Wikimedia entities give priority to efficient free software and reused hardware to decrease power usage from the participants' devices.

Other agenda 2030 work

In 2017, Wikimedia Italia started its work with Asvis on Sustainable Development Goals with a focus on goal 17 through the increase of open data.