Climate and Sustainability

The Climate Sustainability & Equity group’s mission is to engage the Sage community in the exploration of innovative, sustainable climate justice solutions that contribute to practices at Sage, environmental preservation in our community, developing Sage as an exemplar of intentional, organization-level action on CSE, and sharing the beauty of Pacific Northwest nature.

We develop and share existing practices, and implement equitable strategies for climate sustainability with our Sage community.

Carbon Offsets for Plane Travel

Recognizing that we are a distributed team, and that air travel is unavoidable for Home Weeks, conferences, and other Sage-related events, we proposed to purchase carbon offsets equivalent to the excess pollution created by our travels. In 2023, we audited every plane flight Sagers had itemized as an expense report in the previous year, and calculated an estimate for the CO2 equivalent pollution produced by these flights. Sage’s leadership team happily agreed to purchase carbon offset credits for this amount. Combined with existing carbon offsets for our Amazon Web Services (AWS) usage, this means that the major sources of carbon emissions from Sage are being actively mitigated, if not eliminated.

Improve our carbon auditing process

The current process is very manual, and does not take into account additional carbon emissions caused by layovers. We’re working on a method of reliably estimating a lower bound for these additional emissions, as well as making future audits semi-automated and easily reproducible.

Commitment to carbon monitoring and offsets

We are committed to continuing our air travel CO2 audits and working with the leadership to fund a selected portfolio of effective carbon offset purchases. We are planning to do this every year.

Communicating the results of our carbon audits

We want to share the results of our work with the wider Sage community, and have a few ideas about how we can do that.

Outreach and Health

Organizing CS&E related educational and social events, to learn, have fun, and grow the CS&E effort by bringing in new members.

Membership in CS&E is open to any Sage employee on a volunteer basis. Members are expected to attend our one-hour meetings, held once a month, and fulfill any responsibilities they commit to during those meetings