Dimagi Signs the Climate Pledge

The Climate Pledge is a call to businesses and organizations to take collective action on the world’s greatest crisis and to work together to build a safe and healthy planet for the next generations.

This week, Dimagi joined more than 200 businesses committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. While many of these organizations are committing to this target by 2040—10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement—Dimagi has actually already reached this target.

Following up on our recent Climate Neutral certification, our plan to chart, offset, and reduce our emissions has put us nearly 30 years ahead of the agreement.

As part of the Climate Pledge, Dimagi commits to:

1. Measuring and reporting greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis.

We’re taking stock of our emissions by looking at our energy bills and purchase orders from all offices, commuting patterns, aggregate company travel, and packages shipped. In 2020, we estimated our global footprint to be the equivalent of approximately 650 tonnes of carbon dioxide—that’s the same as driving around the world 64 times.

2. Implementing decarbonization strategies

In line with the Paris Agreement, we are exploring real business changes and innovations to decarbonize our business, including air travel reduction and renewable energy-powered data centers. Business travel made up 12% of our carbon footprint in 2020, a year where we traveled only a small percentage of what is considered “normal” for Dimagi, while 50% of our emissions come from our data center that currently does not use renewable energy to power its facilities. Our reduction plan looks to challenge our current organizational culture around business travel to consider both the modes of transportation and necessities of travel given our recent remote year. And while Dimagi does not have jurisdiction over the data center energy resources, we can look to see if there are other options available for storing our data.

3. Neutralize any remaining emissions

The Pledge specifies organizations should explore “additional, quantifiable, real, permanent, and socially-beneficial offsets” to achieve net-zero annual carbon emissions. As part of our work with Climate Neutral, we have already purchased approved offsets from projects that span North America, South America, Africa, and Asia, focusing on regeneration, forest and land conservation, reforestation, and marine conservation.

Signing the Pledge

Since Amazon and Global Optimism co-founded the Pledge in 2019, a growing list of major companies and organizations have joined. We hope this upswell of support in the private sector will play a role in stimulating investment in the development of low-carbon products and services around the world.

“At Dimagi, our goal is to create sustainable impact through the use of innovative technology. In search of that goal, we are constantly evaluating both the social and environmental impact of our programs and operations across the globe,” explains Dimagi CEO Jonathan Jackson. “Taking the Climate Pledge was a logical step for us to take, and we’re proud to have already reached net-zero carbon emissions.”

“The Pledge offers a clear framework to measure, reduce, and neutralize emissions that any company could—and should—follow. We hope to see many more signatories to the Pledge soon and are always happy to share our advice on how we did it.”

Learn more about the Climate Pledge here.