Accelerating to green - climate action at Prosus & Naspers

Visible changes to our planet, growing populations and resource challenges all contribute to the urgency of implementing more effective green solutions, faster. We are determined to play our part.

Naspers and Prosus Group have taken a first but significant step on our contribution to climate action, by going carbon neutral both at a group level and across our majority-owned businesses.

“Our environmental footprint management starts with understanding the material physical and financial climate risks to our business and operations across all the geographies we operate in,” said Prajna Khanna, Global Head of Sustainability.

“We will use our presence – both as investor and operator – across the planet to support the acceleration to greener economies. As an investor, we help the fast transition to greener economies by choosing to invest in businesses that are not inherently polluting and can have a positive environmental impact through their product offering.”

Like every business, our operations generate emissions. However, as an investor in digital technology, we have a limited carbon footprint with our emissions primarily resulting from our office infrastructure and business travel. The operational activities of our majority-owned entities are not only low carbon themselves but also enable users to reduce their climate impact. For example, our fintech and Edtech significantly reduce the need for physical infrastructure and transportation for the delivery of financial services, education. Our classifieds businesses underpin circularity through the resale of a wide spectrum of goods, including cars, thereby extending their life and lowering their lifecycle emissions footprint.

While we are implementing emission reduction initiatives across our group such as the installation of more energy-efficient lighting and motion sensors, installation of solar panels for energy needs, we still have unavoidable emissions that we offset. We’ve partnered with South Pole to offset the scope 1 and 2 emissions that result from our direct consumption of electricity, diesel, petrol, and natural gas, and also the scope 3 emissions resulting from our business travel and scope 1 and 2 emissions of all our majority-owned companies. The offsets are procured from projects around the world, such as forest conservation, hydropower, energy-efficient transport and wind power in South Africa, Brazil, India, and Indonesia. These initiatives help drive social, economic, and environmental progress in these local communities.

Becoming carbon neutral is an important first step in our journey as an environmentally responsible company. Going forward, we will develop and commit to a group-wide decarbonization roadmap with multiyear targets and also drive down the group’s scope 3 emissions by focusing on influencing the reduction of scope 1 and scope 2 emissions for majority-owned businesses.

Learn more about our sustainability initiatives as we continue to build a fair and future-proof business in a rapidly changing world.