Nearly Half of Bloomberg LP Energy Usage Now Comes From Renewables, up Sharply From 17% in 2018

May 8, 2020 - Bloomberg LP received 48.5% of its energy from renewable sources in 2019, up from 17% in 2018 and exceeding its 2020 interim goal of 35% of renewables use, according to the company’s 11^th annual Impact Report released today.

This puts Bloomberg at nearly the half way mark of reaching its target of 100% renewable energy by 2025. Innovative approaches of procuring renewable energy such as Bloomberg’s participation in the Corporate Renewable Energy Aggregation Group set the company on a path to achieve its ambitious 2025 goal.

“The past few months have been extremely difficult for communities all over the world. But this can also be a turning point that propels us forward, including in the fight against climate change. Fighting climate change and growing the economy go hand in hand – bringing about immediate benefits that can save lives and make our communities stronger and more resilient,” said Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies. “At Bloomberg, we’re committed to doing our part and our foundation Bloomberg Philanthropies continues to expand its efforts to drive action on climate change.” Read his letter here.

Mary Schapiro, Vice Chair for Global Public Policy at Bloomberg said: “Both Bloomberg-led initiatives, the TCFD and the CFLI, have made great progress in 2019. TCFD supporter numbers hit nearly 1,000 and the CFLI published its first report providing solutions to scale climate finance. We are collaborating with public- and private-sector partners on these initiatives to rapidly increase participation in a sustainable, low-carbon economy and make markets more transparent.”

“Challenging times like these show that it is ever more important for investors to have the right tools and data at hand to evaluate material risks,” said Patricia Torres, Head of Sustainable Finance Solutions at Bloomberg. “Bloomberg will continue to expand its range of sustainable finance products to help our clients analyze relevant, timely and actionable environmental, social and governance data.”

Highlights from the 2019 Impact Report include:

Thought Leadership

• By year-end 2019, 955 organizations, including financial firms responsible for $132 trillion in assets, had declared support for the recommendations of the FSB Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), which is chaired by Mike Bloomberg.
• The Bloomberg-led Climate Finance Leadership Initiative (CFLI), released its first report, Financing the Low-Carbon Future, which outlines key challenges and solutions for mobilizing private climate finance at scale to support an orderly and inclusive transition to a low-carbon global economy.

Products

• In 2019, we launched the Bloomberg SASB ESG Indices, a new family of indices that covers both U.S. large cap equities and investment-grade corporate bonds in collaboration with the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB).
• New sustainable finance tools help Terminal users look at ESG data in new ways, such as the addition of more environmental data sets to our powerful mapping tools.
• We geared up in 2019 to launch Bloomberg Green, a new multi-platform editorial brand dedicated to climate change news, analysis and solutions in January 2020.

Operations

• Our overall emissions are down 30% compared to our 2007 baseline – exceeding our 20% reduction goal by 2020.
• Since 2008, Bloomberg’s global efficiency measures and environmental projects have resulted in $120 million in avoided operating costs and in 1 million metric tonnes of avoided CO₂ emissions. That is the equivalent of more than 5 years of Bloomberg’s carbon emissions.
• In January last year, we collectively procured 42.5MW of renewable energy from a 100MW solar power project in North Carolina with Cox Enterprises, Gap Inc., Salesforce and Workday coming together as the Corporate Renewable Energy Aggregation Group. This initiative provides a new blueprint for companies to procure relatively small amounts of renewable energy.

People

• In 2019, we expanded our worldwide gender-neutral paid parental leave policy from 18 weeks to 26 weeks.
• 12,915 employees in 80 cities took part in our Best of Bloomberg corporate volunteer program, contributing more than 158,000 hours of volunteer service.
• In 2019, we expanded our GOAL (Growth, Opportunities, Access and Leadership) development program designed to boost the careers of female and ethnically diverse employees in EMEA and the U.S. by enhancing their leadership skills.

The Bloomberg Impact Report outlines the company’s approach to sustainability and the impact of its products, operations, people and partnerships.

The 2019 Impact Report can be viewed and downloaded at www.bloomberg.com/impact, along with our GRI Content Index and SASB Disclosures.

Read the Report