Natural Resources

Managing water use and impacts on biodiversity to preserve nature.

Click through to learn about our 2025 impact in action. For detailed natural resources data, please see our 2025 data tables.

Please note that 2025 data is estimated. Final values will be available in Q2 2026.

Our Approach

While our operations are not considered highly resource-intensive, we seek to operate as a responsible business 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 impact on surrounding habitats and species.

AT&T advances our Gigaton emissions-reduction goal by helping our business customers improve resource efficiency across their operations, ultimately creating both environmental impact and business value.

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

Managing Water Impacts

Most AT&T sites use municipal water sources, with less than 1% drawing water from wells in 2025.¹

AT&T continually assesses our water footprint across our U.S. operations. Tracking and measurement establish a baseline and enable us to identify ways to improve.

Practices like replacing traditional water-intensive cooling systems with more efficient cooling towers and replacing components can help us reduce water consumption while delivering operational efficiencies.

Through our Enterprise Building Management System (EBMS), we are able to better monitor the chilled water needed for cooling towers. EBMS gathers and presents facility equipment data to help us understand equipment performance, enhance predictive maintenance and identify energy reduction opportunities.

Other practices include proactive maintenance, repairs and consolidating or reducing leased building space to cut resource requirements. Where applicable, to mitigate wider water impacts, we maintain a stormwater prevention program that guides us in actively managing stormwater runoff.

We recognize that 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, including reducing their water use. Learn more in our Responsible Supply Chain issue brief.

Managing Forest Impacts

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

When we do use paper products, we verify that they are responsibly sourced in line with our enterprise-wide Paper Procurement Statement. As part of this policy, we have an ongoing goal for at least 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. Learn more 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 Preservation Act, 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 work with state and federal agencies to develop and implement plans to mitigate significant impacts.

Natural Resource Governance

Oversight of natural resource use and environmental impacts is embedded within AT&T’s corporate responsibility and operational governance structure, with executive leadership and functional teams responsible for strategy, implementation, performance monitoring and regulatory compliance across facilities and telecommunications construction activities.

Impact in Action

Our 2025 Impact in Action

Managing Our Water Footprint

During 2025, we consumed an estimated 9.27 million cubic meters of water. We have continued taking steps to manage and minimize water consumption.

We conducted a pilot of ElectroCell technology in our cooling towers to assess potential savings in terms of maintenance requirements, energy use and water costs and are engaging a third-party engineering firm to measure and verify the capabilities and savings generated by this technology.

Promoting Paperless Billing

We have remained focused on reducing paper use and, in 2025, delivered nearly 439 million paperless billing statements. Of the direct mail and office paper we did purchase, 95% was certified by FSC or SFI and 8% had post-consumer waste and recycled content.²

Taking Action for Nature

Since 2005, AT&T has partnered with the Arbor Day Foundation to help restore the world’s forests. Their support over the past 20 years has led to the planting of nearly 1.3 million trees. In 2025, we expanded our partnership during Earth Month to help with the devastating California wildfires through our consumer Tree for Trade-In initiative. For each device traded in by a consumer at any of our national retail locations during Earth Month, we donated one tree to California’s only Forest Service nursery, the Placerville Nursery, for establishment and future planting to help the state’s forests recover. Through this campaign, the Placerville Nursery will establish over 83,000 trees to support restoration following the Southern California wildfires. Through employee e-waste collection events at our headquarters, we also distributed over 500 trees to employees in Dallas. Read more about our e-waste initiatives in our Circularity issue brief and learn more about our disaster relief efforts in our Community Engagement & Investment issue brief.