There’s one big truth in business: To stick around for the long term, you need to innovate for the future while building resilience in the present. It can be tricky to get the balance right—a bit like changing the tires when your car is cruising down the highway. But every once in a while, all the pieces align, and you get to pursue a goal that strengthens your company today and prepares it for tomorrow.
Right now is one of those moments.
This week marks a major step in the NetApp® sustainability journey: the approval by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) of our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. We’re committed to reducing our absolute scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions by 50.8% by 2030 from a FY2020 base year; and to reducing the scope 3 GHG emissions from use of sold products 51.6% per effective petabytes shipped by FY2030 from a FY2023 base year. This expansion is beyond the targets that NetApp originally set in 2022.
Why is this expansion a big deal? As we enter 2025, the world is starting to align around accepted standards for measuring sustainability initiatives. SBTi is one of those standards—and it’s an important benchmark that we’re using to continue delivering value for our customers.
At NetApp, we take pride in being in constant dialog with the people and businesses we serve. We want to know what’s working, what’s not working, and how we can improve. Our customers have been sending a loud and clear message: The economics of data are changing. As AI workloads get heavier, companies are creating and using data at an unprecedented rate that is only set to climb higher—and their energy costs are soaring in parallel.
This kind of energy use isn’t sustainable—not for companies’ bottom lines, and not for the planet.
To reach our new SBTi targets, NetApp is going far beyond just reducing our own carbon footprint. We’re explicitly aligning our product development roadmap with sustainable outcomes, making us the first company in our space to do so. This alignment means that customers can count on our innovations to help manage their most valuable assets—their data—and also to reduce their overall energy usage and costs. That’s a compelling value proposition.
Our new emissions reduction targets are just the next step in NetApp’s ongoing sustainability work. But it’s an important step. The validation of our decarbonization targets by an internationally recognized standard setter like SBTi lets customers know that we’re a trusted vendor in their data supply chain. It’s a signal that we’re committed to advancing sustainability not just today, but for the long term.
To view NetApp’s commitment to reducing GHG emissions, visit the SBTi dashboard.
Visit our sustainability page to learn more about our operational and product sustainability, plus read about our Blue XPTM Sustainability Dashboard which allows customers to view their sustainability score and to get actionable recommendations to balance storage performance and efficiency.
Nicola Acutt is an experienced sustainability professional with 20+ years of leadership at the intersection of business, technology, and sustainability. Nicola joined NetApp as its first chief sustainability officer in June 2024. In this newly created role, she focuses on integrating sustainability into strategy and operations, driving decarbonization across the value chain, and building a sustainable approach to intelligent data infrastructure. Before NetApp, Nicola was chief sustainability officer at VMware. She completed her BS degree at the University of California, Berkeley, and was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to complete a PhD at the University of East Anglia in the UK.