Publishing and the Climate Emergency: the Monumental Challenge Ahead

by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

The global publishing industry has always had a conflicted relationship with the environment. On the one hand, no single industry has done more to educate and inform the general public about environmental issues. Whether through peer reviewed research and journals, consumer magazines, news reporting, books sold in shops or loaned through libraries, pretty much everything we know about the climate crisis is down to publishing, in some shape or form.

Yet, on the flip side, the industry cannot shy away from its own impact on climate change. Hundreds of years of deforestation to serve the print publishing industry are taking its toll. In the US alone, it is estimated that 32 million trees are felled every year in order to make books. Throw in reliance on fossil fuels, water usage, the use of chemical dyes and solvents, and the toll of shipping and flying physical products around the world, and you’ve got yet another manufacturing industry with a resource-heavy supply chain.

While many see the migration towards epubs and PDFs as the ideal way to counteract the industry’s negative footprint, a blog post by our sister company Sheridan recently revealed that digital publishing also has its own environmental drawbacks. The report stated that “data centers contribute around 0.3 per cent to the world’s overall carbon emissions” and that the more data (ebooks, ejournals and other content types) we host the more energy we use, therefore increasing our carbon footprint. Interestingly, it also found that the production of e-reader devices was particularly damaging and that a Kindle would only have an equal or lesser carbon footprint than a single printed book after the purchase of approximately 25 e-books.

Despite these major challenges, in recent decades the industry has been slowly edging towards reducing its impact, whether it is through sourcing paper through energy efficient mills, opting for vegetable-based ink, or switching to print-on-demand models to cut wastage. But during the last two years—notably before and after the COP26 Global Summit—publishers have become much bolder in their rhetoric and ambitious with their pledges, launching a raft of confident commitments to net zero carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

Last fall we saw HarperCollins commit to becoming carbon neutral in “direct emissions” by 2022 and Pearson and Penguin Random House both committing to a carbon neutral “value chain” by 2030, with other large houses pledging carbon neutrality before 2050. Meanwhile, among academic publishers, Springer Nature announced that it had become carbon neutral for its “business operations” in 2020 and Elsevier has committed to net zero carbon emissions by 2040 having signed up to The Climate Pledge. Taylor & Francis are among the 50 signatories of the SDG Publishers Compact—a joint UN and International Publishers Association initiative pledging net zero by 2030.

In publishing, the dial on climate change and sustainability has shifted considerably. We are no longer witnessing symbolic gestures that serve as nothing more than publicity. As the conversation has moved from talking about “climate change” to “climate emergency”, we have observed a welcome renewed urgency both in publishers’ words and their actions as they take great strides towards tackling this monumental challenge ahead.

KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL) is the industry leader in editorial, production, online hosting, and sustainable services for every stage of the content lifecycle. We are your source for editorial solutions, intelligent automation, high-speed publishing, digital delivery, and more. Email us at info@kwglobal.com.