Restoring More Than We Use
Net Positive Water
As part of our ongoing mission to not only do “less bad” but also “more good” for the environment, CyrusOne has a goal of reaching net positive water at all our facilities in regions experiencing high or extremely high-water stress. To achieve this designation, we restore 20% more water than we use at the site to regional watersheds through partnerships with local environmental organizations.
Large data centers like ours have great potential to reduce environmental impacts by combining the computing power of many smaller data rooms into fewer larger data centers. This allows for more efficiencies, but it also concentrates some of the resulting impacts into a single region.
For issues like greenhouse gas emissions, this concentration is of small consequence since all emissions go into the same atmosphere and climate change is a global issue. But for local issues like water stress, concentrating the water demand into a single watershed can have big impacts on local communities and ecosystems.
Our net positive water methodology has three steps. We first identify which of our facilities are in areas with high or extremely high-water stress using the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas.
A good number of our data centers are located in water stressed areas, meaning that the demand for water in an area exceeds the supply available for use. Because water is a limited natural resource in high demand, issues with water supply could interrupt facility operations or lead to a conflict with local communities.
Next, we attempt to reduce water usage on site through operational efficiency measures and upgrades.
Finally, we partner with environmental nonprofits such as Bonneville Environmental Foundation to fund restoration of water flows in our selected regions. These projects help to provide more abundant water to communities and improve habitat in rivers, wetlands, and meadows. If we can restore at least 20% more water than we use, we consider this to be a net positive water facility.
To make a lasting impact, this can’t just be a one-time investment. Instead, once a facility becomes net positive water, we continue to support restoration projects annually to cover the site’s water use. Each year we will add to our net positive water portfolio until the program covers all of our facilities in high- or extremely-high-stress regions.
As of 2022, all of our facilities in regions classified as extremely high water stress by WRI now restore more water to local watersheds than they remove. Our next stop is high water stress regions.
