As leaders and experts convene in Egypt for COP27, we’re outlining progress on our climate commitments and announcing expanded tools to help our communities take action against climate change. Like previous years, we’re focusing on how we can leverage our technologies, apps and operational strategy to demonstrate our commitment to solutions.
Responsible Operations
Since 2020, we’ve achieved net zero greenhouse gas emissions for our global operations as they are now supported by 100% renewable energy. We’ve also set ambitious goals to achieve net zero value chain emissions and to restore more water than we consume in our global operations in 2030. Reducing our emissions and helping our suppliers to do the same is our top priority to reach our climate target.
This year, we announced a new partnership with Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify and McKinsey Sustainability to launch Frontier, an advanced market commitment to help scale emerging carbon removal technologies that are crucial to tackling climate change.
Elevating Authoritative Climate Information
As evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have an essential role to play during global crises in connecting people to accurate information. That’s why we’ve built and expanded a number of tools to provide authoritative information about the realities of climate change.
We’ve created a new page that explains our holistic approach to addressing climate content and misinformation on our apps. Our investment in the Climate Misinformation Grant Program is forging new partnerships and initiatives, and our Public Ad Library gives an extra layer of transparency into all climate ads.
- We’ve expanded the Climate Science Center and it’s now available in 165 countries. We’re also expanding Climate Inform Labels, a tool that adds links to Facebook posts about climate change and connects people with expert-backed information in the Climate Science Center.
- We’ve launched a Climate InfoFinder tool that enables people to search for trusted information about climate change and link to this content directly in comment threads.
- We worked with partners to help launch our first Climate Science Literacy Initiative. Its goal is to pre-bunk climate misinformation by running ads across our products and apps that feature five of the most common techniques used to misrepresent climate change.
Empowering Communities to Take Action
After our largest-ever global survey about climate change this past spring painted a picture of deep concern among respondents, we have seen meaningful change happen when communities come together. More than 40 million people around the world are part of at least one of the 24,000 Facebook Groups dedicated to the discovery, protection and appreciation of the earth and our environment.
We’re testing a new feature in Facebook Groups, called Climate Pledges, which leverages the power of communities to enable climate action. Developed with inputs from the UN Environment Programme and UN’s ActNow, the Climate Pledges feature contains expert-backed climate solutions to spark conversation and help people understand the most impactful actions they can take. Group admins can choose the solutions most relevant to their communities, invite group members to join, provide support and offer tips to keep everyone accountable. For example, a solar panel group admin may choose to activate the “Switch to renewable energy” pledge and group members commit to joining it together. Group members can also discover relevant content, including Reels, from across Facebook which they can then localize to their communities.
Helping Equip Our Partners With Resources
Our Boost Guide to Green Program has reached 1.3 million small and medium-sized businesses (“SMBs”) on how to become greener. We released a new report in October, in partnership with Accenture, which explores the relationship between SMBs and climate action, and how digital technology can support them. Our Data for Good program also provided data from our small business surveys to the World Trade Organization, which published a report on small businesses’ experiences and challenges related to climate change.
We also launched the Climate Perceptions Index, developed by the Social Progress Imperative, using data from our 2022 Climate Change Opinion Survey. It offers information on the societal implications of climate change with new data on people’s awareness of climate change, their perception of its risks and their commitment to climate action.
Finally, we have collaborated with the World Resources Institute on prevention campaigns to reduce food waste, reaching more than 40 million people in Germany and the UK. We’ll use the insights we gain from these campaigns to inform future work.
