Natural Resources

Managing water use and impacts on biodiversity to preserve nature.

Click through to learn about our 2024 impact in action. For detailed natural resources data, please see our corporate responsibility KPI webpage.

Although public awareness around the impacts of resource consumption continues to increase steadily, global domestic material consumption increased by 66% between 2000 and 2019. Similarly, while global water use efficiency has improved by 9%, many people still live in water-scarce areas with restricted access to drinking water, sanitation and hygiene. To preserve valuable natural resources — and increase equitable access to them — for the long term, we all have a role to play in responsibly managing consumption.

While our operations are not considered highly resource intensive, we seek to operate as a responsible business, including by managing and addressing our impact on nature. Some of the natural resources impacted by our operations include:

• Water: Most of our domestic water consumption is used to maintain the cooled and controlled environments required for our communications network.
• Forests: We use some paper products for bills, direct mail and office paper.
• Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Wherever we have operations, we are mindful of our impacts on surrounding habitats and species.

By switching from copper wiring to fiber in our networks — and by encouraging customers to return devices at their end of life — we are also working to reduce impacts on virgin materials like copper and rare earth metals.

Managing Water Impacts

Most AT&T sites are fed by municipal water sources, with less than 1% drawing water from wells in 2024. These sites are metered for total volume of water withdrawal. We do not withdraw from brackish or saltwater sources.

Though not a material issue for AT&T, we continually assess our water footprint across U.S. operations. Tracking and measurement establish a baseline from which we can identify improvement opportunities, such as replacing traditional, water-intensive cooling systems with more efficient cooling towers. We also deploy our Energy & Building Management System, which helps property managers optimize cooling water management and equipment operation.

Other actions to address water use include enhancing proactive maintenance and repairs, using smart irrigation systems, creating connected monitoring systems for remote, real-time water use management, and consolidating or reducing leased building space to cut resource requirements. In terms of mitigating wider water impacts, we maintain a stormwater prevention program that guides us in actively managing stormwater runoff that can transport pollutants to larger bodies of water.

We recognize certain areas of our supply chain contribute to our indirect water footprint, for example, leased data centers and the production of chips that are incorporated into AT&T products. To engage suppliers around environmentally responsible practices, our standard Citizenship & Sustainability clause includes the expectation that suppliers follow our Principles of Conduct for Suppliers. Within the principles, it states, “AT&T expects suppliers to apply a continuous improvement approach to enhancing economic, social and environmental conditions. This is possible through suppliers’ use of innovative products and services, ruling out wasteful practices, improving energy efficiency, reducing total cost of ownership, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, using more sustainable packaging, reducing water use, creating end-of-life recycling alternatives, ensuring adequate treatment of hazardous waste and reducing the total use of substances of concern.”

Managing Forest Impacts

Reducing paper billing represents a valuable opportunity to manage our reliance on paper products. We have reduced the size and weight of paper bills and encourage customers to switch to online billing.

Where we do use paper products, we ensure they’re responsibly sourced in line with our enterprise-wide Paper Procurement Policy. As part of this policy, we have a goal for 90% of total paper consumption for direct mail and office paper to be certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) or Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI).

We also strive to reduce the material impacts of our consumer-facing packaging, which you can learn about in our Circularity issue brief.

Managing Ecosystem Impacts

We’re responsibly managing our operations and networks to minimize impacts on threatened and endangered species and their critical habitats. We comply with all applicable laws and regulations. This includes Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules for implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and National Historic Protection Act (NHPA), which together aim to minimize significant adverse impacts on historical sites, tribal lands, floodplains, wetlands, endangered and threatened species, and critical habitats.

As a tower owner and a wireless licensee, we are subject to these regulations and follow defined procedures to comply with them. This includes reviewing, with the assistance of third-party environmental vendors, all projects to build or modify cell sites to understand potential impacts on the surrounding environment, based in part on the FCC’s NEPA environmental assessment checklist. When necessary, we will work with state and federal agencies to develop and implement a plan to mitigate significant impacts.

Natural Resource Governance

Several groups hold oversight responsibilities for natural resource use and impacts:

• Board of Directors’ Governance and Policy Committee (GPC): Oversees all corporate responsibility issues, including company natural resource management. The Chief Sustainability Officer updates the GPC periodically throughout the year.
• Corporate Responsibility Governance Council: Is led by our Chief Sustainability Officer and comprises senior executives and officers responsible for business areas most closely linked to our current corporate responsibility priorities.
• Senior Vice President of Corporate Real Estate and Security: Responsible for the overall global real estate footprint, including the efficient and responsible operations of that footprint.
• Global Real Estate: Oversees natural resource management through general building maintenance, equipment upgrades, and consumption and use performance reporting.
• Access Construction and Engineering: Ensures compliance with national regulatory requirements related to the construction and modification of telecommunication structures. 

Managing Our Water Footprint

During 2024, we consumed an estimated 9.59 million cubic meters of water. We have continued taking steps to manage and minimize water consumption.

In 2023, we completed an ElectroCell technology installation for cooling towers that is projected to deliver significant savings in terms of maintenance requirements, energy use and water costs. We continue reviewing this technology for installation at additional facilities and, during 2024, identified three units that will be installed in early 2025.

Promoting Paperless Billing

We have remained focused on reducing paper use and, in 2024, delivered over 413 million paperless bill statements. Of the direct mail and office paper we did purchase, 97% was certified by FSC or SFI, consistent with 96% in 2023. We also achieved 6% post-consumer waste and recycled content.¹

Taking Action for Nature

Since 2005, AT&T has partnered with the Arbor Day Foundation, helping plant more than 1.2 million trees that have restored over 1.9 million acres of forests to date. During 2024, we again partnered with the foundation to celebrate Earth Month with a tree-planting initiative. Throughout April, for every wireless device customers traded in online, a tree was planted. In total, 50,000 trees were planted to replace those destroyed by 2018’s Hurricane Michael in Florida and the 2021 Bootleg Fire in the Klamath Falls Basin of southern Oregon. Collectively, the trees created over 125 acres of forests that will equate to more than 21,000 metric tons of carbon avoided and sequestered over 40 years.

We also encouraged employees to get involved with action for the planet during Earth Day 2024, which you can read more about in our Community Engagement & Philanthropy issue brief.