Responding to the climate challenge with our journal community

Exploring how we can tackle the climate emergency together

The issue of climate change – and what we can do to prevent this – is something that we at Elsevier have been concerned with for some while. As with many of you and your institutions, we are passionate about playing our part and where necessary changing our working practices to enable a better future for the planet. The shared imperative to “think green” has guided our actions for many years but the COVID-19 pandemic has helped to accelerate some of these efforts and has enabled us to embrace new ways of working which, though occasionally demanding, are both effective and ecological.

We’d like to explore how we can tackle the climate emergency together and how we can engage our journal communities. With the recent COP26 climate change conference opens in new tab/window, the world’s attention has been sharply focused on the actions needed to “… recover cleaner, rebuild greener and restore our planet”. COP26 has delivered a clear message - words are great, and pledges even better but there is only one thing that will make a real difference and that is action. As we start to emerge from the pandemic, and life returns to a new normal, everyone has a responsibility to use the pandemic as an opportunity to ensure that we bounce back in a greener and more sustainable way. Elsevier and our journal operations are no different.

Though our work is by no means complete, we have striven to apply ourselves to the challenge in various ways and are actively assessing where and how we can do more to respond to the climate emergency. In July 2021, we signed up to the Climate Pledge, holding ourselves accountable to becoming net zero for all direct and indirect emissions by 2040 at the latest opens in new tab/window. In doing so, we are not starting from scratch. We were already at net zero for our direct emissions (so called “Scope 1 and 2”) and business travel in 2020. What the pledge will ensure is that we continue to rapidly reduce all our direct and indirect emissions as well. To achieve this goal, we have:

• Set a clear target to reduce carbon emissions resulting from business travel by 50% before 2025, based on a 2019 baseline, saving around 10,000 tonnes of CO2e emissions annually.

• Established an ambitious climate action program focused on sizing and reducing indirect emissions from suppliers (“Scope 3” emissions).

• Formed a Climate Advisory Board of distinguished research experts to help identify the challenges, explore best practices and launch initiatives that will accelerate progress in climate change research.

• Leveraged our data analytics capabilities for a report entitled Pathways to Net Zero: The Impact of Clean Energy Research to advance the understanding of research and innovation in clean energy and how it supports the drive towards a net zero future.

• Explored the increased impact on health due to climate change via the Lancet Global Countdown report opens in new tab/window.

As well as initiatives such as those listed above, smaller changes can also contribute to the broader goal. We are already working to further reduce our carbon footprint by e.g., moving to e-only production where possible, printing closer to customers and using lighter paper to reduce the impact of transit, and removing plastic covers from journals.

This is all positive, but we need your help to identify and embrace more new habits that are kinder to our environment and natural resources. The pandemic has already given us an opportunity to review how we work. We are now experiencing more remote collaborations and tools like Zoom have become a familiar feature of our daily lives, but this has helped us to discover new ways to interact and continue to advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society.

Looking to the future, there are clearly changes that we can and should make to our journal publishing operations and the way that we work together with our editorial teams that will be beneficial for the climate. Rather than returning to the old pattern of annual (or even more frequent) face-to-face meetings, we’ll embrace more virtual collaborations and will carefully consider whether we can’t achieve the same aims without carbon-heavy travel. (It is worth noting that conducting more meetings virtually also brings benefits in terms of inclusion by making it easier for a greater variety of stakeholders to contribute.) By encouraging and adopting working practices that are greener, we hope to be able to make a real contribution to the climate emergency. Your help will be invaluable in this regard so we invite you to engage with your publishing contact in a frank conversation about how the journal(s) on which you work can become greener.

We will be in touch down the line with some more practical suggestions and the results of our ongoing analysis into how we can reduce our Scope 3 emissions. In the meantime, please do take the opportunity to share your thoughts and ideas – either below in the comments or in conversation with your Elsevier team. The climate change emergency affects us all. It is a significant challenge, to be sure, but with the “ambition, courage and collaboration” embodied by COP26, it is a challenge we can overcome. Together.