New Relic’s Net Zero Goals – Erin Dieterich, New Relic

This is texturing TV. Hello everyone. I'm Bonnie Schneider on techstrong TV.

And today. I'm excited to be speaking with Aaron Dietrich. She is a senior director of social impact and ESG at New Relic Aaron leads the company's efforts to create more Equitable access to technology and drive their commitments to ESG today.

We'll be discussing new relics recent commitment to achieving Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 Aaron. Thank you so much for being here today. Thanks, Bonnie excited to be here.

Wonderful. Well Aaron, can you give us a little bit of an overview about your own background and the work that you're currently doing in New Relic? Sure.

So I've been working in the corporate social impact space for about 20 years. Now. I had the opportunity to start my career working on an entertainment company building programs to impact the community and then moved over to Tech about 10 years ago about five years ago.

I joined New Relic to build out our social impact work and in 2021 stepped over to lead our ESG work, which is really focused on building the operations in order to make sure that we're driving towards all of our key ESG areas and this climate plan is really just a key part of that work now. That's great. So what motivated New Relic to set a net zero emissions goal by 2030 and how does it fit into the company's broader ESG strategy?

So ESG is really critical for us to be able to meet our goals of our business. We've spent the last three years transforming both our product and our business model and with that recent evolution of ESG. We feel like we are on the right track to set our our goals around science-based climate and so we will continue to do that and we think that sending those kinds of climate goals helps us future proof the business these new goals help us evolve alongside our customers.

We've been hearing from them. They're starting to start their own climate Journeys as well. And as they do that work and build in their own climate goals.

We want to be seen as a key partner to evolve alongside each other. We're really excited to be a vendor of choice for them and it was exciting to be able to set an ambitious goal and be the first observability company to set a net zero 2030 goal. That's fantastic.

And it's also interesting that so many of the companies that you're speaking to are on the same page as you and they're doing similar goals as well saying, can you share with us some of the key steps that New Relic plans to take to achieve this ambitious goal. Absolutely. Our strategy is built on two key pillars.

The first piece is really thinking about operational efficiencies. How do we look through our whole business and understand where the opportunities are to improve our climate impacts and once we've done all of that work, then we'll begin to purchase high quality carbon removals to offset the remaining emissions and get us to Net Zero. So in that operational work, which is really the key work we're taking on right now, there's four areas of opportunity that we see the first is about our vendors.

So just like I was talking about us being a vendor to our customers. We're really looking at our own vendors as well. And that's because for SAS company like New Relic the majority of our greenhouse gas emissions fit into scope three, and so scope three is things that are not directly owned by us.

Those are our value chain emissions that are attributable to us. And so we want to think about how we're partnering with all of our vendors to build that strategy. How are we understanding their climate goals?

How are we engaging them? If they have not yet started their own climate programs and helping them along their Journey because we know you know as they build their climate programs it only helps us. So that's really the first and the most important piece of the strategy.

The second piece is around tracking our data. We're really data obsessed at New Relic. And so we want to keep digging into our greenhouse gas emissions data understanding it getting more granular in each aspect because we think that that's going to show us some of the new efficiencies that we can put in place.

So that will always be really a critical piece of being able to move towards net zero and then thirds oh, sorry, go ahead Bonnie. No, I'm just gonna ask you if you could kind of break down how you're planning to measure and Report the progress. I think you're kind of explaining it but maybe just take a deeper dive.

So every year we continue to work with a partner called Watershed and we bring in all of our different data sources into that platform to help us be able to look at our full greenhouse gas. Questions footprint and then we can actually kind of pull apart the pieces and say okay these emissions are attributable to this part of the business. And so now we need to look for more efficiencies there.

That's really this key part of how the data plays a role in our strategy and every year we issue an ESG impact report and that report will moving forward not just showcase our greenhouse gas emission footprint and the numbers but it'll also talk about the strategies and the things that we've tested out this year and how we're moving towards our goals because we see those goals as things that will continue to evolve, you know the ways that we're actually going to create these operational efficiencies. We'll have to change and evolve every year as the business grows. And so things like assessing our operational footprint and continuing to see climate as one of the business drivers as we're making those operational decisions will be a piece of that as well as setting a lot of policies for our employees and some internal programs to help really guide and motivate employ.

Is to see the role that they play in US achieving our NetZero goal because it is a collective goal everybody at New Relic is going to step forward and be a part of us achieving Net Zero 2030. Can you tell us more about the science-based target initiative and why it's important for companies to set science-based emissions targets. Absolutely.

So the science-based target initiative is a partnership that is driven by the United Nations Global compact as well as a couple other really key players in the space. And so what they are doing together is really trying to drive this ambitious action for the private sector. We know that you know, every company around the world has a role to play in US achieving our Global Climate goals and so sbti is sort of put themselves at the center of saying hey, we're gonna develop Frameworks.

We're gonna work one-on-one with companies to assess their plans and make sure that those plans actually are directionally going towards the climate goals that have been set in the Paris climate agreements. So we're really excited that sending an sbti near term Target was part of our NetZero launch because we think that it is a clear signal to our Builders about the validity of our plan and showing that seriousness we want to ensure that every part of our plan is backed by science and make sure that we're taking the right steps that we need to take to reach NetZero by 2030. And what role do you think technology companies in general can play in driving the transition to a more sustainable economy.

So the tech sector is estimated to actually account for think about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Which doesn't sound like a huge number but then when you realize the aviation industry accounts for two percent, it really puts it into perspective Tech has a huge role to play in us being able to achieve our Global goals towards a more sustainable future for us as a SAS company. A lot of our impacts are around energy usage and thinking about how do we optimize?

What energy or how do we optimize our Cloud usage and working with our Cloud vendors is going to be a key piece of our strategy. I also think that the tech sector just loves and Prides cell phone being a place of innovation and so I'm really excited to see tech companies evolving how they're building climate into their strategies and we've seen lots of small climates startups popping up in Tech, but it's not just the role of an organization who's entire focus is climate to build climate Innovation. I think it's all of our jobs and so it's an exciting opportunity.

Think about what does that mean for your company? Small example is that at New Relic? We've contributed the cloud optimize app to the open source Community, which is just a way for users to look at how they're optimizing what they put into their cloud services because we know that optimization leads to reductions and costs and can lead to improved efficiencies, which is also good for climicals.

So thinking about those pieces of innovation that we can each be driving to make the whole Tech sector really think and reflect on how we reduce that overarching 3% of greenhouse gas. Emissions is is part of the work and has work. That's really exciting to be a part of Can you tell us about some of the other social impact initiatives that New Relic is involved in?

Sure. So new relics social impact work is focused on driving more Equitable access to technology and we do that through a few key ways. One of the pieces is really democratizing access to the New Relic platform itself.

So we provide expanded free access to New Relic for nonprofits and Charities as well as students around the world. We want them to have access to our tools and really be able to plan and build and deploy and run amazing software that we know is going to move the world forward and we use our employees' time and skills to help those nonprofit customers through pro bono volunteering where we're partnering with them on their technical challenges and our employees also get to be involved in lots of volunteering and giving efforts in their local communities. We have a global day of service and lots of giving and matching opportunities around different campaigns that are employee resource groups put together and finally we just this year introduced our Global impact fund wherever Where we fund a hundred thousand dollars of Technology projects for nonprofits because we know that technology needs are often underserved by Grant makers and by individual donors or really excited to kind of step into that and offer funding for specific technology projects that are nonprofits have identified.

That's great. Well, Aaron Dietrich at the senior director of social impact and ESG at New Relic. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing those ambitious goals.

We're looking forward to following New Relic and this exciting Journey. Thanks for having us. All right.

Thank you so much. We'll stay with us on techstrong TV. We'll be right back.