Building today for a more resilient tomorrow

As we navigate the complexities of our modern world, the challenges of energy and climate are becoming increasingly urgent. Global energy consumption spiked dramatically in 2024, driven in large part by cooling needs during record-breaking temperatures, according to the International Energy Agency. This surge in energy demand has created a concerning cycle in which warming temperatures drive increased energy use, which further accelerates climate change.

That’s why our approach to environmental sustainability is not just about lowering emissions. It’s about long-term resilience and adaptability. It’s about treating sustainability just like we do security and finance — as a decision-making factor from the outset. Investing in energy efficiency now improves our resiliency, reduces our impact on the environment and nurtures stronger communities by reducing grid strain.

Our newest investments in renewable energy include state-of-the-art geothermal technology at our Purchase, New York, global headquarters, and solar panel arrays next to our Tech Hub in O’Fallon, Missouri, on the roofs of our Dubai regional headquarters and our offices in Harrogate, U.K., and mounted at our Kansas City facility and the Purchase office.

They’re designed to reduce demand peaks during extreme weather events and maintain critical operations — after all, as a growing technology business, our consumption of electricity is expected to grow as well.

When it came time to replace our natural gas heating and cooling system in Purchase, where natural gas is responsible for more than half of our direct combustion of fossil fuels, we saw it as an opportunity to drastically reduce emissions. In the green sweep of lawn in front of our headquarters, we’re drilling 160 boreholes 600 feet deep into the earth, which will be filled with a piping-connected heating and cooling system.

In the summer, the closed-loop ground source heat pump will siphon heat from the building, storing it in the ground until the winter, when it can be pumped back into the building. To power the system, we’ll be switching from natural gas to electricity sourced from renewable energy, further reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.

In St. Louis, where our data center requires significant energy, we have acquired land next to our campus to house solar panels while preserving half of the land and committing to restore every tree removed as part of our Priceless Planet Coalition’s efforts to restore 100 million trees on six continents. The solar panels will produce renewable energy to support our operations there, advancing our sustainability goals and reducing the demand on the grid, which helps our neighbors and community to better weather extreme events.

And to bolster resiliency, we are developing sophisticated real-time monitoring and response capabilities throughout our operations to anticipate and adapt to increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, including installing weather stations to track extreme temperatures, heavy precipitation events and their impacts.

Beyond these large-scale projects, our teams are constantly looking at ways big and small to better source, deliver and optimize technology to decouple business growth from energy consumption — from factoring in the carbon considerations of real estate investments and infrastructure improvements to monitoring and analyzing sustainability data from our individual servers to decommissioning and consolidating servers to optimize our energy usage.

Our investments in geothermal and solar technologies represent the first phase of our broader commitment to building truly resilient energy systems that can withstand the challenges we all face. We are demonstrating that profitable businesses can simultaneously be good neighbors — that business success and community well-being are fundamentally connected. We remain dedicated to creating a sustainable world where businesses and communities can thrive together, today and tomorrow.

Ellen Jackowski is Mastercard's chief sustainability officer. Tara Maguire is executive vice president for Financial Operations at Mastercard.