3 new ESG reports + green storytelling + an El Niño "wave train" – GTG Links 73
Welcome back – it's been a hot minute, in some sense quite literally. It's May (typically an autumnal month here in Melbourne), and yet I'm sweating through 26 degrees. In the northern hemisphere, temperature records have also been smashed. It's been a spooky end to the month. We will have to console ourselves with some interesting new sustainability reporting from game companies. Onward!
37interactive’s ESG report is out.
They are still releasing Mandarin-only reports, I'm afraid, but I have managed to make a machine-translated PDF version to bring you the best bits. Here's the table of GHG emissions – still down from 2019, but up substantially (+60%!) from 2024. What's going on there?
It's not just Scope 3 (and we only get upstream S3 categories); the biggest jump is actually Scope 2 (600 in 24, to 3500 tCO2e in 25). That wouldn't have anything to do with the very prominent role of AI technologies in the annual report, could it?
A more positive development is that 37i has “identified that climate change may lead to increased physical risk exposure ...potentially posing a direct threat to the operation of office facilities and employee commuting safety at the company's locations." What precautions have they taken? See below:
The company's administrative and property management team has therefore improved its emergency response plan for extreme weather at office locations and has readily available flood prevention and disaster relief facilities. The technology center, on the other hand, utilizes cloud services and cloud-based disaster recovery technology to ensure the security and business continuity of game operations and user data during extreme weather events.
Fairly similar story to CDPR's report from March – everyone's getting prepared, and just in time too (see the news about the forming El Niño later in the newsletter).
Stillfront's CSRD report
Overall emissions were down 12% in 2025 – a nice result, and peep those "primary data" percentages getting up there.
They've also improved calculation methods, which has delivered cuts (mainly on paper, but we'll take it) through increased accuracy. Still, better accuracy leading to lower emissions is... well, just what we would expect. It's a win we should still celebrate, particularly as it's the first step towards wrestling those emissions under control.
During 2025, Stillfront refined the calculation methodology for Scope 3 Category 11: Use of sold products by replacing aggregated “Rest of World” modeling with a more granular six-region framework. To improve comparability, the 2024 comparative figure was recalculated using the updated geographical split. This reflects a methodological improvement rather than the correction of a prior-period error. The reported 2024 Category 11 figure was revised from 49,395 tCO₂e to 29,253 tCO₂e, a difference of 20,142 tCO₂e.
Better data = 20,000 tonnes off the books. How's that for efficiency? Also, check out the cool energy consumption table below – 29% renewable electricity is a little bit low – but it is trending upward.
The whole report is extremely comprehensive too – kudos to the preparers, and a hot tip for anyone working on a CSRD report still: check it out.
Green Storytelling in Games
April is apparently Green Stories in Games month, with a pair of pieces, the first, a podcast from Climate One about what games are doing to talk about and show climate – ranging from board games about climate change to Cities Skylines renewable power DLC. Listen to the podcast here.
The second is the Hollywood Reporter noticing that games a) exist, and b) do storytelling, just like film! Here's a short except from right at the end, presented with no further comment from me whatsoever:
Nintendo, though not a Playing for the Planet member, says one of its “most important responsibilities is to protect the environment. To that end, the company “engages in sustainable business practices.”
“Reducing our global energy consumption remains a priority for us and will continue as we work to advance these initiatives,” Nintendo shared through a spokesperson.
Tony Maglio
Data Centre Digest
Amazon urges investors not to back a resolution to disclose more detail on whether its data centre energy consumption plans and expansion threatens its climate goals. Why would you even try and hide this? Oh because you have something to hide, riiiight.
Dan Robinson
AWS new “Sustainability console” for custom reporting
Meanwhile, in a classic "left hand keeps the right hand guessing" development, Amazon have also released a big new sustainability reporting capacity. This potentially brings AWS up to the same level as the other hyperscalers and their customer carbon calculators.
Sébastien Stormacq
Doing research, sustainably
New open access book on low carbon research methods, edited by Anne Pasek looks super good.
Edited by Anne Pasek
Urban mining in India’s e-waste stream
“At its facility on the outskirts of Delhi, Rizwan Saifi expertly dismantled a discarded hard drive, slicing out a permanent magnet destined for an advanced recycler, where it will be shredded to recover dysprosium — a rare-earth metal essential to modern electronics.
"Earlier, all we would care about was copper and aluminum because that is what was high-value in the scrap market," Saifi, 20, said.
"But now we know how valuable this magnet is.”
Arunabh Saikia and Uzmi Athar
5G but lower energy
Deutsche Telekom has apparently reduced the energy used by their 5G mobile network – it's quite impressive on the surface, though I still don’t really know how they did it as the details are a bit sparse.
Amiya Johar
The Concerning Climate Corner
Australian Summers are 49 days longer than they were 33 years ago (!!). Having lived through the entire period in question, I definitely knew something like this was happening, but the sheer extent of the climate creep has shocked even me. The key is to take "summer" as days above certain temperatures – rather than as calendar dates. The effect is harsher and less gradual transition of the seasons, which I've also noticed. Properly scary.
Caitlin Fitzsimmons
The Copernicus report on the European climate in 2025 has some stark information – including the fact that Europe is the fastest-warming continent on earth. You want to do something about that, Europe? Maybe a good idea?
The full report is here.
El Nino coming
This year and even more so 2027 is shaping up to break all new temperature records – thanks to the return of a very strong El Niño.
Remember! Don’t think of it as the hottest summer of your life - think of it as the coldest summer of the rest of your life.
Zeke Hausfather
And another new phenomenon to add to the list of unsettling climate things we're currently living through – how about this: a Pre-El Nino “wave train” is making its way across much of the Middle East, leading to floods, and heavy rains across some very dry areas.
Albert Pinto
The Good News
Alright, enough scary stuff. Time for the good news!
I came across this seemingly niche, but apparently quite promising new tech for cargo ship propulsion. A tall, but small footprint rotor on deck spins and creates areas of high and low pressure, which act like an extra motor:
Norsepower Rotor Sail™ uses a minimal amount of the ship’s electric power to rotate cylindrical sails on the deck. It packs the air behind the sail – and thins it from the front side. This creates a powerful thrust and raises the top speed – or allows the engine to be throttled down.
Here's a diagram from the brochure.
And a video all about it. Cool stuff!
Battery charging craziness continues
Last time I mentioned the new BYD flash-charging that filled up entire car batteries in minutes. Not to be outdone, CATL showed its even faster (???) charge at the Shanghai auto show.
If you haven't watched a video of an electric car charging its battery faster than a smartphone... well, you really have to see it to believe it. This is straight up sci-fi stuff.
And on the subject of vehicles – the growth of electric trucks is super encouraging. The IEA seems to be projecting even more decarb potential from electric trucks (not to mention a massive reduction in particulate matter!) than passenger EVs. Hands up all who had diesel demand destruction on their 2026 bingo card?
And last but certainly not least – this is extremely good news about the prevalence (or lack thereof) of bird strikes at wind turbines. Turns out birds aren't suicidal after all, and largely adjust their flight paths to stay away from turbines. Hell yes. One less specious argument against renewables out of the way.
Joshua S Hill
That's it for this week. As always, thanks for reading. Back soon with some more good news, I hope.
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