Becoming carbon neutral, a key step on our journey as a sustainable business

Author: Joyce Lorigan

Global Head of Corporate Affairs

Today we publish Springer Nature’s 2020 Sustainable Business report - the fourth annual report on the company’s environmental and social impacts. 

We’ve updated the name to reflect our updated strategy, which reflects the variety of ways we are working to become a truly sustainable business including how we contribute to wider societal challenges such as climate change, reducing inequality and others set out in the UN’s sustainable development goals. For our 2020 report, we also outline how COVID-19 has had an impact on research publishing, our business operations, our ways of working -- and how we collectively took action in the face of those challenges. 

The full report is available as a PDF download, but if you want to get a shorter digest, take a look at our Sustainable Business microsite to read the highlights, including:

• Springer Nature is now Carbon Neutral for emissions relating to our offices, fleet and flights. Find out in the report how we achieved this, through a combination of reduced energy consumption, increased use of green energy, and high-quality offsets. 
• We are making good progress against our commitment to achieving a greater gender balance in our senior leadership, with women now making up 43% of our most senior 3 tiers by the end of 2020, up from 39% in 2018.
• The content we publish is making a significant contribution to the sustainable development goals (SDGs), with more than 300,000 relevant articles or book chapters published since the goals were announced in 2015, downloaded more than 750 million times. We are proud to be part of the SDG Publishers Compact.

We made significant progress in 2020 towards our aims as a responsible and sustainable business. But there is more to do. Later this year, the UN Climate Change Committee will meet for an important review of progress against the Paris Climate Agreement - COP26. Science plays a huge role in these efforts, and as publishers of critical climate research we want to continue to play our part in disseminating the most critical information and minimising our own impacts. As we return to a new normal, being mindful of our corporate footprint will remain an important element in how we do things as we play our part in creating a more sustainable future. 

To find out more Springer Nature’s Sustainable Business progress in 2020, read the report.