Okta’s climate update: Scaling and building in 2024

Climate change is no longer a distant threat — it is a present-day crisis, and the urgency to act has never been clearer. Our stakeholders — from customers to employees to investors — are requesting transparency, accountability, and progress in reducing our environmental impact. The global landscape is rapidly shifting as U.S., and international legislation on climate-related disclosures continues to grow. This annual update reflects our ongoing efforts, challenges, and steps we plan to take in the year ahead. While the path forward is challenging, we believe we have a responsibility to take sustainable actions — not just for the planet, but for people and future generations.

Progress in 2024

During the calendar year 2024, Okta, Inc. (“Okta,” “we,” or the “Company”) continued to achieve our 100% renewable electricity commitment, covering Okta’s offices, remote workforce, and third-party cloud services. In the U.S., where environmental attribute certificates (EACs) are known as renewable electricity certificates (RECs), we aim to purchase RECs with an accompanying social benefit, such as community solar and solar from California public schools. As part of our our global renewable electricity program, we increased the percentage of social benefit RECs from 68% in FY22 (February 1, 2021-January 31, 2022) to 82% in FY23 (February 1, 2022-January 31, 2023) to 88% in FY24 (February 1, 2023-January 31, 2024). Data for FY25 (February 1, 2024-January 31, 2025) is forthcoming once our fiscal year ends. 

• Real estate footprint/offices (Scope 1 & 2): In FY24, Okta’s total scope 1 and 2 emissions maintained a 74% decrease relative to our FY20 (February 1, 2019-January 31, 2021) baseline. Some of our meaningful actions to reduce our real estate footprint include: achieving LEED Gold certification for the 13th floor in our San Francisco headquarters; relocating our Toronto office to a more energy efficient and walkable site; and selecting a new, LEED Gold location for our Dublin office, we which opened in FY25.
• Business travel: Okta maintains a Sustainable Travel Guidebook for all Okta employees with resources, recommendations, and educational guidance on sustainable business-related travel. In FY25, we set targets to optimize business-related travel for many of our business organizations. We also tracked carbon emissions on a quarterly basis, gathering detailed data on the emissions generated by our employees' travel. Our ESG and Sustainability team, among others, compiled and regularly presented this data to Okta's leadership, becoming a regular aspect of the dashboard used to run each team's operations. As part of our ongoing sustainable business travel program, we continued to explore alternative travel options, like virtual meetings and train travel, as part of a broader push to lower the business travel-related emissions of our employees. We also worked to integrate sustainable travel considerations into our meeting and events planning. We continue to support the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance (SABA), as a key mechanism to accelerate decarbonization of the aviation sector as a whole. We also continue to make small purchases of sustainable aviation fuel certificates (SAFc) as a key lever to reduce business travel emissions.
• Vendor engagement: As of FY24, 23% of our suppliers have set science-based targets (SBTs). We continued to scale our vendor engagement program by expanding our resource offerings, including hosting three educational webinars for our vendors, offering consulting services to our vendors at no cost, and communicating our expectations through our vendor scorecard.

Our learnings

Reflecting on our progress and challenges over the last fiscal year, we’ve gathered insights that are shaping our ongoing efforts for the near term.

• Real estate: Alignment between ESG & Sustainability and workplace/real estate teams is important so that expansion efforts into new markets prioritize all-electric buildings with sustainability certifications. We have made progress on aligning the size of our spaces with the demands of the business to maximize efficiency. 
• Business travel: Reducing absolute emissions from business travel remains one of our most challenging goals. We have made progress, where possible, in reducing air travel and promoting more sustainable alternatives by encouraging virtual meetings, offering hybrid options (such as in-person and online experiences for our annual customer conference, Oktane), combining trips to reduce total flights, and replacing short-haul flights for some routes in Europe with high-speed rail. However, the sheer volume of necessary business travel, especially for leadership and client-facing teams, means that absolute reductions are difficult to achieve. We are continuing to engage with leadership to better understand opportunities for reducing travel and addressing barriers. We recognize that the challenges are systemic and require broader industry-wide advancements — such as the development of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and widespread high-speed rail — before we can make significant strides on this front. In the meantime, we’ll continue to focus on reducing unnecessary trips, bundling travel, promoting alternative options where possible, and supporting decarbonizing the aviation sector via our membership in SABA and purchases of SAF certificates.
• Vendor engagement: Vendor engagement continues to be a powerful lever for driving sustainability, but we’ve learned that tailored support is critical. Our vendors are at varying stages of their carbon emissions measurement and target-setting journeys, and as such, they need resources that match their level of maturity. Collaborative approaches, such as offering sustainability resources, have proven effective to a certain extent. However, we’ve also learned that, in some cases, moving to a formal contractual request for sustainable action may be necessary to continue to drive impact. In an effort to alleviate burdens on Okta’s suppliers, we have been working collaboratively with peers in the technology industry through the Business Council on Climate Change to send consistent messaging and requests to our vendors. This reduces the reporting burden on suppliers to create space for action.

A call to action: Join us

Climate action is not just a corporate responsibility — it's a collective one. We invite our customers, partners, and peers to continue to join us in taking steps toward a sustainable future. 

To learn more about how our stakeholders can get involved in Okta’s sustainability efforts, and about Okta’s climate strategy, goals, and progress, visit our Climate & Energy webpage and stay tuned for more updates.