Combatting climate change
TeamViewer is a European - even more precisely - a German company. If you have not heard about Germany yet, let me share some facts with you:
Surrounded by wonderful neighbors, Germany is located pretty centrally in Europe. It has access to the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, with a coastline of approx. 2400 km. The country has not only beautiful beaches but also high mountains and deep forests like the mystic Black Forest or the legendary Brocken.
And Germany is only a small part of the whole world. Everywhere you can find beautiful spots of nature - worth being protected. We at TeamViewer know, that digitalization can make a difference for our planet. Through technology that enables remote operations, we can avoid a massive amount of CO2.
CO2 emissions
That using TeamViewer has a positive effect on CO2 emissions will not sound like a big surprise for you. Not flying or not driving to a customer somewhere leads to less CO2 emission. That's logical!
But we wanted to learn more about the overall global impact of remote control software and online collaboration. For this, we worked together with the DFGE Institute for Energy, Ecology and Economy to find out what the usage of TeamViewer means for the global CO2e (= CO2 equivalents ) emissions.
But what are CO2 equivalents? When we talk about emissions, we often focus on carbon dioxide (CO2) — the most dominant greenhouse gas. However, there are a number of other gases, like methane, that significantly contribute to global emissions, all of which together are quantified in one single metric called CO2e.
What's the result?
37 megatons of CO2e per year for 2019.
Let me repeat:
By using TeamViewer, the amount of CO2e avoided are impressive 37.000.000.000 kilograms.
Yes - that's massive, but also a bit hard to narrow it. You can translate those 37 megatons into 7000 fully booked A380 flying non-stop from Singapore to New York or the number of emissions of eleven million cars in one year.
Coming back to what I said above about being surprised: We were indeed surprised by how significant the effect is in detail.
Positively for sure, and as our CFO Stefan Gaiser said, "we are incredibly proud of the impact our products are having in helping our [...] users around the world reduce their CO2e emissions each year."
How was the data raised?
The detailed study's central part was a voluntary, anonymous online survey conducted between October and November 2020 among TeamViewer users almost evenly distributed across EMEA, APAC and AMERICAS.
As we can read on the official TeamViewer site, "[o]ne challenge of the study was that TeamViewer's solutions can be used for various scenarios and use cases in all industries. Ranging from service technicians maintaining deep-sea cranes hundreds of kilometers offshore without traveling by plane, to IT specialists remotely managing the global server infrastructure for their company and friends and family helping each other with IT problems – regardless of where they live."
To represent as many different use cases as possible, the DFGE developed 216 descriptive user profiles, which "evaluated whether TeamViewer is used daily, weekly, monthly, or annually, and calculated how many trips with which distance would or could be replaced as well as which means of transport would most likely be used for the trip."
What's next?
Let's take Stefan Gaiser's word for granted:
"At TeamViewer, we are fully committed to the creation of a greener and more sustainable future, and we are constantly challenging ourselves to develop a new range of tailored and innovative solutions for our users."
The phrase "Think global - act local" has been cited a million times for a million different topics, at least. Still, we all can refer back to it another million times as it has this undeniable truth in it.
Let´s work on it together
Every company and every human being has an impact on climate change. Avoiding travel is not a fad from the Coronavirus - it has been there before, and it will stay: Digitalization and an intelligent infrastructure allowing and promoting remote work, remote maintenance, and online collaboration between humans and devices are here to stay and to avoid CO2 emissions going forward even more.
Every kilogram CO2 avoided sums up to values as high as the 37 megatons we are celebrating today. And it is easier as you might think.
Two examples:
- An average TeamViewer connection avoids 13kg CO2e.
- An average TeamViewer subscriber avoids up to 4000 kg CO2e per year.
Let's make smart decisions as human beings, as companies, as countries, and together as continents for a global impact on protecting our climate and combatting climate change.
Watch this video to learn more
Former Community Manager
