Environment

Providing solutions that align with our purpose with benefits for our business, the environment, and how people work.

Our environmental strategy and approach

With 100 million users in more than 100 countries, Citrix sees sustainability at scale as one of our greatest opportunities to be an agent of environmental change in our industry. During 2021, we comprehensively analyzed sustainability across our global operations and portfolio, and spent the year assessing the most significant optimization opportunities.

100 million users in more than 100 countries

Our strategy and management approaches to environmental impact are grounded in strong policies. They align with our enterprise-wide commitment to operate in a sustainable manner that minimizes GHG emissions and preserves natural resources.

Our Environmental & Climate Policy describes how we operate our business to reduce our environmental impact, how our products enhance our customers’ sustainability initiatives, and how our solutions make it possible for employees to get work done from anywhere on any device — while reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Helping customers on their sustainability journey

We facilitate our customers’ transition to long-term, flexible work models while simultaneously helping to accelerate their sustainability goals. These are not mutually exclusive priorities: In fact, they can work together to reduce carbon emissions at scale.

Our core product help customers reduce their energy demand and mitigate environmental impact by cutting office space needs, enabling a shift from energy-intensive desktops and chips to more energy-efficient devices, and making it unnecessary for applications and data to reside on endpoint devices. Our customer Neste, for instance, relies on Google Cloud Platform and Citrix cloud services to shrink the number of servers it uses on demand, allowing the organization to operate in a more energy-efficient way.

IT departments continue to incorporate sustainability objectives into their business. According to our recent Pulse survey2 of IT decision-makers, hybrid work has had a significantly positive impact on GHG targets:

76
%

of respondents said their organization had sustainability targets in the past 12 months

93
%

at organizations that have these sustainability targets in place agreed that remote work has helped them with their GHG goals over the past year

84
%

said their company will offer a mix of in-office and remote work in the future, with 67.5% planning to reduce or eliminate their physical real estate

Our solutions enhance IT asset sustainability value by:

Deploying low energy devices

Our products support restriction-free employee device selection so customers can select devices with a low energy consumption to reduce business carbon footprints. Citrix Workspace provides high performance for endpoint devices and reduces user computing device emissions by 90 percent annually.

Extending device lifecycles

Citrix Workspace helps reduce annual embodied GHG emissions and lengthen the useful life and environmental impact of IT devices by three to seven years.

Enabling carbon zero cloud computing

Citrix technologies facilitate the shift from less efficient on-premise data centers to carbon zero cloud hosting. Our cloud services simplify delivery and management of Citrix technologies and reduce costs and business carbon footprint.

Reducing commuting emissions

We create secure and flexible work options that increase hybrid work and decrease commuting emissions. Citrix workspace, networking and analytics transform how employees work to allow them to work securely from any location.

Office equipment energy consumption can use up to twice the amount of home office equipment. Traffic jams in the U.S. account for 26 million additional tons of GHG emissions.2

2 Global Workplace Analytics

Responding to the climate crisis

2021 was the sixth-warmest year in recorded history globally1, with heatwaves and droughts reaching extreme levels in much of the world. It also was the fourth-warmest year on record in the U.S. and brought the highest-ever maximum temperatures in Canada and Europe. There were 21 named storms (the third-highest such number on record) in the Atlantic hurricane season, and a 10-day period of frigid temperatures was the coldest weather event in the continental U.S. in 30 years2.

Many scientists see the climate crisis as the defining issue of our time. The world must reduce carbon emissions significantly to cap the increase in global temperature at 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Doing so can help to curb the negative effects on natural resources, weather, biodiversity, food security, and the earth’s habitability. Businesses and governments must act swiftly and collaboratively to mitigate the intensity of these risks.

As a company doing business worldwide, Citrix must address its contributions to climate change. We’ve implemented climate risk mitigation and resiliency strategies and continue to influence our customers, suppliers, and partners to take action. There is no time to lose.

To learn more about our climate mitigation strategy, see our 2021 CDP Climate Change disclosure and the TCFD Index of this report.

Emissions and energy

1 NOAA
2 NOAA

Global economic growth rebounded 5.7% in 2021 after falling 3.3% in pandemic-stricken 2020. Despite the world’s huge migration to the hybrid working model, demand for energy jumped as people and businesses adapted to the new normal — and emissions soared accordingly:

Energy consumption rose 5.0% globally in 2021 after falling 4.0% in 20204.

Emissions of CO2 increased 5.9%, more than erasing 2020’s 4.9% decline6.

Emission-intensive industries played a prominent role in the surge. Air travel roared back to life as pent-up demand pushed families and businesses to take to the skies again, and energy companies pumped more oil in response to higher demand and stronger pricing.

For Citrix, the message is clear: We must work even harder to raise energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions both for our customers and ourselves.

Improving measurement of emissions data

In 2021, we focused on improving how we measure, track, and reduce the carbon emissions from our:

Scope 1:

direct fuel consumption and vehicle fleet

Scope 2: 

indirect purchased electricity

Scope 3:

indirect upstream activities (purchased goods and services, capital goods, fuel- and energy-related activities, business travel, employee commuting) and indirect downstream activities (transportation and distribution, use of sold products)

As our data collection and measurement continues to improve, we have recalculated our 2019 baseline year emissions in order to better track our progress and make more accurate year-over-year comparisons. Examples of data enhancements include: 

  • The inclusion of new vehicle fleet data (Scope 1)
  • Additional data center emissions data (Scope 2)
  • The inclusion of supplier specific emissions factors (Scope 3 – purchased goods and services)

3 World Bank 4 Enerdata

We obtained and evaluated supplier-specific GHG reporting for five of the company’s top 10 suppliers, and calculated a supplier-specific emission factor by multiplying the suppliers’ total Scope 1, 2 and 3 numbers.

We obtained and evaluated supplier-specific GHG reporting for five of the company’s top 10 suppliers, and calculated a supplier-specific emission factor by multiplying the suppliers’ total Scope 1, 2 and 3 numbers.

Our emphasis on Scope 3 (which comprises the vast majority of our emissions) continues to provide significant opportunities. Since 2019, we have reduced Scope 3 emissions by addressing our supply chain impact, and we are making steady progress within our own operations. We additionally signed the SBTi Science Based Targets Call to Action Standard Commitment Letter (separate chart scope categories 1, 6, 11).

2019 - 2021 emissions by Scope (MT CO2e)

Scope 2019 2020 2021 2021 vs. 20191
Scope 1 Fleet/heating: 3,579 Fleet/heating: 3,377 Fleet/heating: 3,344 -6.6%
Scope 2
(market based)		 Purchased electricity: 18,674 Purchased electricity: 13,874 Purchased electricity: 15,928  -14.7%
Scope 3 Purchased goods and services: 115,337Capital goods: 11,814 Fuel- and energy-related activities: 6,643 Business travel: 18,806 Employee commuting: 8,984 Downstream transportation: 347 Product use (sold hardware): 170,121 Total Scope 3: 332,052 Purchased goods and services: 101,308 Capital goods: 6,386 Fuel- and energy-related activities: 5,309 Business travel: 7,635 Employee commuting: 2,710 Downstream transportation: 110 Product use (sold hardware): 115,943 Total Scope 3: 239,401 Purchased goods and services: 109,861 Capital goods: 8,861 Fuel- and energy-related activities: 7,969 Business travel: 3,455 Employee commuting: 317 Downstream transportation: 42 Product use (sold hardware): 108,161 Total Scope 3: 238,666 -0.3%
Total
 354,305
 256,652
 257,938
 -2.6%

1 We re-baselined our 2019 emissions in 2021 to include additional scope 3 categories, and have used 2020 emissions in these categories as a proxy for 2019 figures. The scope 3 categories previously included were categories 5 and 6. The added scope 3 categories are category 1, 2, 3, 9 and 11..

Reducing our energy consumption

In 2021, we continued to replace outdated key infrastructure assets that consumed significant energy with more energy-efficient versions. These included new chillers used for cooling our office spaces, appliances and fixtures, and water-saving faucets. In addition, we implemented our sustainability plan encouraging lower energy consumption per employee as we reopened some offices.

Waste and recycling

In 2021, we continued our efforts to reuse, recycle, or divert waste from landfills.

Almost all Citrix offices have simple and easy recycling options. We reuse, recycle, and/or divert landfill items such as plastic bags, packing foam, cardboard, wood, metal, electronic waste, fluorescent bulbs, and batteries.

While we generally discourage single-use products, they became a necessity for health and safety during the pandemic. This led to an increase in the amount of waste per person, but our site waste volumes significantly declined due to limited building occupancy.

As some of our workforce returned to the office, we reduced the need for single-use products as much as possible by providing reusable mugs and cutlery. We additionally sourced compostable single-use break room and café containers, utensils, cups, straws, and plates.

A major priority is to develop robust sustainability education programs to encourage positive behavioral changes regarding waste and recycling efforts in our sites. In 2021, we promoted remote work programs to improve home-based office sustainability, such as proper waste and recycling techniques, and ideal temperature settings.

We kicked off a project to shrink our physical waste footprint by reducing the use of hazardous chemicals, improving how employees use our recycling program, and lowering the consumption of single-use materials in our break rooms and cafés.

Citrix works with partners, such as the producers of our hardware devices, that use advanced manufacturing technologies and expertise to build high-quality products responsibly and adhere to rigorous standards. For example, we promote opportunities to reuse and recycle materials, enhancing our products’ circularity. These partnerships also help to identify opportunities to repurpose products and integrate recycled content to improve each manufactured item’s sustainability.

Sustainable design

Sustainability is a strategic business imperative of our Real Estate and Facilities Management team’s approach to facilities design and management. Building on our pandemic experience in 2020, the team continued to evaluate our real estate portfolio and worked with business unit leaders to assess the needs for many of our physical leased/owned offices.

Moving forward, we plan to include several sustainable elements in our facilities, including the installation of more energy-efficient appliances and fixtures, and water-saving faucets.

We’ve already taken steps to improve the sustainability of our buildings, with recent improvements including:

 
Installing bipolar ionization equipment to sterilize air at facilities

 
Upgrading air handler controllers

 
Replacing fluorescent light fixtures with new LED light fixtures

 
Discontinuing the provision ofsingle-use water bottles across UK sites

 
Harvesting rainwater

 
Recycling electrical equipment

Sustainable supply chain and procurement

Visibility into our supply chain is critical to improving our procurement practices and making them more sustainable. Our Procurement team works across Citrix to ensure that we ethically source all our purchases — both direct and indirect — for the best available price at the time of purchase.

To effectively manage our supply chain risks, we’ve developed environmental criteria for all goods and services that generate waste or carbon emissions. The goal of this evaluation process is to reduce our environmental impact, with a focus on sourcing products that will withstand their anticipated demand and reduce waste while safely maximizing a product’s useful life.

Other ways to reduce our carbon impact are to minimize demand for unnecessary materials and eliminate unnecessary items. By sourcing sustainable alternatives to standard everyday purchases such as office supplies and bulk snacks, we can limit our waste and help to increase demand for more sustainable goods and services.

We’re also working to better understand both the impact of our Scope 3 emissions and how to best collect sustainability data from suppliers. While we can’t directly control Scope 3 emissions, we can influence suppliers by developing standards for them to follow. To that end, we are using learnings from our successful Supplier Diversity team’s criteria development process — while ensuring alignment with Procurement and REFS metrics — to report spending in certain environmental categories.

As a CDP Supply Chain member, we engage with more than 100 key suppliers to collect primary data and climate strategy information. In our 2021 CDP survey of suppliers, for example, we found that overwhelming majorities have integrated climate change into their business strategy, are leading their climate governance efforts from the C-suite, and are engaging with their own suppliers regarding GHG emissions and climate change strategies. This year, we incorporated CDP Supply Chain data into our emissions inventory calculations for the first time. We evaluated supplier-specific GHG reporting for five of Citrix’s top suppliers and calculated a supplier-specific emission factor by multiplying the suppliers’ total Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.