Great for Privacy, Great for the Environment: DuckDuckGo Is Now Carbon Negative

Filed under DuckDuckGo News on 31 Jan 2024

DuckDuckGo is now carbon negative dating back to our founding in 2008 through 2020, and is committed to being carbon negative in perpetuity.
We've pioneered new estimation techniques, given our distributed team and non-physical product.
We're accounting for our full-scope emissions, including upstream and downstream suppliers.
We're donating the equivalent of 125% of our calculated net emissions to projects vetted by carbon-offset startup CNaught yearly, ranging from emissions reductions to conservation and long-lived removal.
We're giving that same dollar amount yearly to advance carbon removal technology, currently via Carbonfuture.

At DuckDuckGo, our vision is to raise the standard of trust online. We also care about our impact offline, so we've stepped up to do our part in the climate crisis. We have already been doing what we can to minimize our carbon footprint, including using sustainable energy to power our servers and being a fully distributed company. We’re proud that, as of 2020, DuckDuckGo is carbon negative dating back to our founding in 2008.

When we set out to do this, we quickly realized there wasn’t much guidance for companies like ours that have 100% distributed teams and provide non-physical goods and services. We hope our experience figuring this out can be a reference guide for similar organizations. Here’s the summary:

Redefining the Scope. We defined our carbon footprint in the broadest possible sense, including all of our suppliers, and vendors (In carbon language, that means Scopes 1, 2, and 3, as well as any other upstream/downstream activities we could pinpoint). We estimated the total impact of all search queries using our search engine, all our marketing activities (including the carbon used when viewing our online display ads), and – given we are a fully distributed company – the impact of all our local working environments.
Estimating Emissions. During our initial estimate in 2020, we back-estimated to our founding in 2008.
Net Zero Emissions. In 2020, we funded Gold Standard projects to achieve net zero emissions. Today, we work with CNaught, a carbon-offset firm that relies on leading science to build a rigorously vetted portfolio of projects from around the world, designed from the ground up to maximize climate impact.
Going Carbon Negative. To go carbon negative in 2020, we first funded an additional 25% of reduction, for a total of 125% of our emissions. We then doubled this dollar amount and spent the second half on Stripe Climate to help build a much-needed market for carbon removal. We’re continuing this work with Carbonfuture, with a global portfolio of expertly vetted carbon removal projects backed by a cutting-edge, data-powered monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) solution that brings trust to every stage of the carbon removal process.

Redefining the Scope

We set out to calculate our carbon footprint using the commonly used Greenhouse Gas Protocol. The Protocol groups emissions into three “scopes” and additional activities:

Scope 1: Direct emissions, e.g., emitted by factories or vehicles you own.
Scope 2: Indirect emissions from purchasing energy, e.g., buying electricity for or heating and cooling your buildings.
Scope 3: Other indirect emissions from making products and services, e.g., from purchased materials, business travel, etc.
Full Upstream/Downstream Activities: Other emissions not covered so far in the full lifecycle of your products and services, e.g., distribution, storage, and disposal, sometimes covered in Scope 3 definitions and sometimes not.

Many companies who claim they are “carbon neutral” are often only looking at their Scope 1 or Scope 1 and 2 emissions, even though Scope 3 and Full Upstream/Downstream Activities are often where the vast majority of emissions take place—especially for organizations not producing or processing physical goods.

In addition, many organizations only look at activities where clear guidelines have been defined (e.g., air travel), but ignore areas where there are no guidelines (e.g., impact of marketing, home offices, etc.), even if much of the organization’s carbon emissions are the result of these activities.

At DuckDuckGo, we didn't think the standard went far enough, so we redefined our approach to make us responsible for all emissions we cause that are not already net zero, regardless of their categorization (or lack thereof).

Estimating Emissions

To estimate our emissions, we pulled together leading source material from environmental agencies around the world including the UK DEFRA / DEEC 2012 GHG Conversion Factors for Company Reporting, the EPA's 2018 Emission Factors for Greenhouse Gas Inventories Report, the BEIS' 2019 Government Greenhouse Gas Conversion Factors for Company Reporting Methodology Paper, and the Environmental Commission of Ontario's 2019 Climate Pollution Report. From here, we mapped out the carbon footprint of every single transaction on our books for the entire 2019 calendar year (since we started working on this in mid-2020) and used that to build a model to estimate category emissions per accounting transaction. That means every vendor bill and credit card purchase by a team member.

While some transactions fit into standard models developed by government agencies (e.g., air travel), it turned out that to our knowledge, no one in government had ever calculated the carbon emissions of an online display advertisement. So, in cases where there was no standard model—or where we felt a standard model clearly under-estimated the actual carbon footprint—we developed our own formulas.

We then surveyed our team to better understand their home-office/co-working situations, including the hardware and software they use, their work-related transit, and recorded all this usage as if it were regular direct Scope 1 emissions.

This led to us estimating some currently unorthodox emissions including:

The hardware and software our staff use in their home offices.
A proportional amount of heating/cooling used in each home office during the workday.
The fuel used in the vehicles staff take to partner meetings.
The emissions that stem from our marketing (both online and offline), such as showing a display ad on a user's computer.
The amount of emissions generated from each DuckDuckGo Private Search query.

Lastly, we checked the sustainability programs of every single vendor we used in any capacity. Where one couldn't be identified, or where the program clearly failed to account for 100% of their carbon emissions, we recorded the full CO2e emissions from those transactions as our own.

In the end, our estimate for our 2019 emissions — including Scope 1, 2, 3, and Full Upstream/Downstream Activities — totaled 1,075T of CO2e. That works out to an average of 14.33T of CO2e/per year/per full-time team member. We used that figure to calculate a total of 5,875T of CO2e for the entire existence of DuckDuckGo, from our 2008 founding through 2020.

Net Zero Emissions

Once we felt our carbon emissions were properly estimated, we set out to understand how we could properly achieve net zero emissions in a way that would:

Directly reduce carbon.
Not come at other environmental costs.
Respect and improve human life.

After an extensive review of our options, we first partnered with GoldStandard.org, an international non-profit foundation that is focused on reducing carbon emissions through sustainable investment in carbon reduction projects that also help improve the lives of those involved. Those projects included:

Funding biomass generators in India, Malawi, Kenya, and biodigesters in Cambodia to bring safe, clean, self-reliant energy to small rural farming villages.
Funding new wind farms in India and Indonesia, to provide clean energy to regions currently dependent on coal burning electricity.
Providing solar cooking stoves in Chad, and improved clean efficiency stoves in Guinea and Rwanda, to end coal burning pollution and help protect families from inhaling toxic fumes when cooking in the home.
Funding hydroelectric power in Honduras, and renewable energy in Brazil.
Supporting biomass conservation and local biodiversity reforestation in Nicaragua and Ethiopia to help local farmers and conservationists rebuild soil that is suffering from desertification due to deforestation.

Current partner CNaught’s projects are similarly distributed across five categories ranging from emissions reductions to conservation and long-lived removal. You can learn more about each category, including example projects, on the CNaught website.

We're proud that DuckDuckGo is not only achieving net zero emissions, but doing so in a way that we hope will have a transformative and on-going impact around the world, creating jobs and improving the health and quality of life for many.

Going Carbon Negative

Addressing the climate crisis requires us to collectively get to net zero global emissions. We believe doing so will require the use of new technologies at scale, such as physically removing carbon from the atmosphere and sequestering it permanently. Unfortunately, this technology is too expensive right now to make an impact at scale.

In 2020, we were one of the first companies to join Stripe's Climate Program to bring down the cost of this technology by making commitments to fund this new type of carbon reduction. Unlike other carbon reduction methods, Stripe's program required that all carbon removal has a permanence of greater than a thousand years, is directly measured and verifiable, and has a net-negative lifecycle ratio of less than one.

Today, DuckDuckGo is pleased to contribute to carbon removal with Carbonfuture. We have committed that every year, whatever amount of money we spend on CNaught projects, we will make an equal dollar contribution to Carbonfuture to help directly remove carbon from the air – and more importantly, to help pull this technology forward. Visit Carbonfuture’s website to learn more about their rigorous, data-driven approach to carbon removal.

Sustainability at DuckDuckGo

We're committed to doing our part, both online and off. As a DuckDuckGo user, we hope you can rest assured that we are doing our part in the climate crisis. We're now achieving net zero emissions through rigorously measured programs that continue to have a positive environmental and societal impact year after year. We're going carbon negative by funding projects to account for 125% of our emissions, and then doubling that total amount to invest in physically removing carbon from the air to advance this important technology for our future.

Note: This blog post has been edited since initial publication with additional information about our sustainability commitments.

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