How Our Teams Lead By Example: Bloomberg Impact Report 2018

Last year brought alarming new evidence of the risks we face from climate change. Droughts, wildfires and powerful storms claimed lives and caused billions of dollars in damages. We urgently need to do more to confront this growing crisis.

At Bloomberg, our teams are committed to helping lead the way. Talking about challenges isn’t enough — we have a responsibility to do something. We measure our progress and hold ourselves accountable, and each year we publish an Impact Report to share what we’re doing to create a more sustainable world.

Here are the highlights from this year’s report:

• We aim to get 100 percent clean power by 2025. Over the last ten years, we have improved energy efficiency by 45 percent, which has cut carbon emissions while also producing more than $116 million in cost savings. Our European headquarters in London has been rated the world’s most sustainably-designed office building, and we hope it will set an example for other companies.

Our European headquarters, located in the heart of London. The building uses 73% less water and 35% less energy than a typical office building of its size.

• We are helping our clients take action by bringing transparency to markets. We now provide environmental, social and governance (ESG) data for more than 11,500 companies, tools to analyze the growing green bond market and in-depth research on technologies and trends in clean energy. The more we can accelerate investment in projects that both reduce emissions and create jobs, the more progress we can make reducing health and economic risks.
• Companies and investors often lack good data on climate-related risks and opportunities, which prevents them from taking action. Two industry-driven organizations that Bloomberg helped launch – the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB)and the Financial Stability Board Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) – are helping to fix that.
• Last year, SASB published the world’s first set of industry-specific reporting standards on sustainability issues. Meanwhile, more than 600 companies and financial institutions around the world have endorsed the TCFD recommendations on measuring and reporting risks they face from climate change.

These efforts go hand in hand with the work that our foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, is doing to spur progress on climate change:

• In partnership with the Sierra Club, we have helped to close more than half of U.S. coal power plants – 286 out of 530 and counting – since 2011. Recently, we set a new goal of retiring every remaining U.S. coal plant by 2030.
• We will soon launch an ambitious campaign called Beyond Carbon. It is a grassroots effort to help move America as quickly as possible away from oil and gas and toward a 100 percent clean-energy economy. We’re recruiting partners from across society to help us reach that goal.

A still from our recent film Paris to Pittsburgh, produced in partnership with National Geographic and RadicalMedia.

• Nearly 2,700 cities, states, businesses and universities have committed their support for the Paris Agreement through the America’s Pledge coalition that we co-founded with former California Governor Jerry Brown.
• Last year, through our American Cities Climate Challenge, we awarded grants to help 25 leading U.S. cities significantly cut emissions.

• Bloomberg employees contributed over 161,000 hours of volunteering in 2018, including thousands of hours helping to make cities greener and more sustainable.

We are just getting started. In the coming year, we will continue to ramp up our efforts to fight climate change and build a stronger, more resilient global economy. There’s too much at stake to stay on the sidelines — for us, our planet and our economy.

How are you and your organizations committing to build a more sustainable future? Leave a note in the comments below. I hope you’ll join us.

Explore the interactive 2018 Bloomberg Impact Report here.