Sustainability matters to us. It shapes how we operate, the standards we hold ourselves to, and the partners we choose to work with. We want to be transparent about what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how we're measuring progress. This post is our honest account of where we are and where we're headed.
You Can't Improve What You Don't Measure
The first and most important step in any sustainability program is understanding your actual footprint. For us, that picture looks different from a traditional company with offices and physical infrastructure. Research Solutions is fully remote, which means we produce no Scope 1 or Scope 2 emissions. No buildings, no owned facilities, no fleet.
What we do generate falls entirely within Scope 3: the emissions embedded in our supply chain and operations. That includes employee hardware, data processing and storage, business travel, energy use for remote work, and the professional services that support our business day-to-day. These aren't easy categories to influence, but they're the ones we're responsible for, so we track them.
In FY2024, digital infrastructure, covering cloud hosting, data storage, and AI processing, accounted for 43% of our total Scope 3 footprint. Travel and commuting represented 23%, purchased professional services 20%, with the remainder spread across energy, food and drinks, and other categories. That breakdown tells us where to focus, and it informs every target we set.
Building A Program Grounded In Real Accountability
We've structured our sustainability program around four leading global frameworks. Not because participation looks good on a webpage, but because external validation is the only way to make environmental commitments mean something. It's too easy to set targets you know you'll hit. Independent standards don't let you do that.
Our emissions reduction targets are validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), a corporate climate action body backed by the World Resources Institute, CDP, the UN Global Compact, and WWF. SBTi defines what "aligned with climate science" requires, and our targets have to meet that bar. In the short term, we're committed to reducing Scope 3 emissions per full-time employee by 25% from our FY2024 baseline by 2030, roughly 4.2% per year. In FY25, we hit that target. Emissions per employee dropped from 3.79 tCO2e to 1.99 tCO2e. Our long-term target is net zero across all scopes by 2045, with a 50% absolute reduction in Scope 3 by 2035.
We also submit annual disclosures to the CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project), which scores companies on climate change, forests, and water security performance, ranging from basic disclosure through to leadership-level practice. In the 2024 disclosure cycle, Research Solutions received a B score, the highest level achievable for a small or medium-sized company under the CDP SME methodology. That external record is available to our customers and partners, and it holds us to a consistent standard year over year.
Our broader sustainability performance is independently assessed by EcoVadis, one of the most widely used corporate sustainability rating platforms in the world. EcoVadis evaluates companies across environmental, social, ethical, and procurement practices. Research Solutions currently holds a “Committed” rating, reflecting our active engagement with structured ESG practices and our trajectory toward continuous improvement. EcoVadis gives our partners and customers transparent, third-party validation of where we stand.
And as a key vendor to the Scientific, Technical, and Medical (STM) publishing community, we’re a proud signatory of the UN SDG Publishers Compact. That commitment reflects something we believe: the tools we build to help researchers access knowledge should be part of the solution to the world’s biggest challenges. We’re currently working to identify concrete initiatives through which our platform and publishing partnerships can make a measurable contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We’ll be sharing those details as they take shape.
What About The Environmental Cost Of AI?
It's a question we hear more often now, and it's a fair one. Every query processed through a large language model, every document indexed on a cloud server, consumes energy. The per-query footprint is modest. Across 206,000 active users running multiple queries daily, the cumulative load is real.
For us, this falls directly into the 43% digital emissions category, our single largest source of Scope 3 emissions. Our approach to AI aligns with our company-wide sustainability goals, which are independently validated by SBTi, CDP, and EcoVadis. Our environmental policy requires that services be sourced from providers running on renewable energy, with that requirement increasing annually in line with our science-based targets. This applies to our AI infrastructure the same way it applies to everything else we source.
In practice, this means we prioritize cloud and infrastructure providers that have made verified commitments to renewable energy sourcing. Amazon Web Services (AWS), a key part of our infrastructure, has published targets to power its operations with 100% renewable energy and has been investing in renewable energy projects globally to back those targets. We actively factor a provider’s environmental commitments into our procurement decisions, and our policy sets an 80% renewable energy sourcing requirement for cloud services, a threshold that rises each year.
We’re also in the process of scoping the AI-related component of our digital footprint with greater precision. As AI becomes more central to our products, the questions around its energy consumption will only sharpen. We’re building the measurement infrastructure to stay ahead of that curve rather than playing catch-up.
The Internal Work That Makes It Real
Sustainability can't live only in a policy document or a set of external disclosures. It has to be practiced internally too. That's why we established a dedicated ESG Committee, led by Chris Bendall, our VP of Strategy & Corporate Development, to monitor performance against our targets, update our policy as our operations evolve, and keep the entire organization engaged with what our commitments mean in practice.
The committee also extends our accountability outward. We're working toward ESG policy compliance from 100% of our partners and vendors, because Scope 3 emissions don't stop at the company boundary. Influencing them means pulling the whole ecosystem along. Our travel policy favors rail over air when practical, requires carbon offset options when flying, and discourages business class travel. Each of these is a written commitment, documented in policy and enforced in practice.
Because we’re a growing company, we’ve structured our short-term targets around emissions intensity per employee rather than an absolute figure. That way, growth doesn’t mask whether we’re genuinely improving. The FY25 results (a drop from 3.79 to 1.99 tCO2e per employee) show the approach is working.
Where We Go From Here
Sustainability work is complex, and we're still learning. Getting the data right takes time. Influencing supply chain emissions is harder than reducing the ones directly in your control. And as AI becomes more central to what we do, the questions around its energy footprint will only grow in importance.
Our confidence comes from the structure we’ve built: validated targets through SBTi, annual public disclosures through CDP with top scores for our size, independent assessment by EcoVadis, a formal compact with publishing partners through the UN SDGs, and an internal committee that moves work forward between reporting cycles.
We serve a research community that holds rigorous standards for evidence. We think it's only right that we hold ourselves to the same standard when it comes to our own environmental commitments. We're proud of the progress we've made, and we're clear-eyed about what it will take to keep it going.
Researchers If you have questions about our sustainability program or want to understand how our ESG commitments connect to the products you use, feel free to get in touch.
