Posted: 09/10/2025

Defra Release Their Digital Sustainability Strategy for 2025 to 2030

Defra have released a report on their digital sustainability strategy from 2025 to 2030 with a vision to minimise the environmental, economic, and social impact of its digital and ICT operations.

The strategy aims to:

Support enterprise-wide sustainability goals.
Avoid uncoordinated efforts and enable alignment across teams.
Help suppliers understand Defra’s sustainability approach.
Ensure accountability for progress on sustainability targets.

The strategy covers all corporately provided digital and technology services across the Defra group, including:

Core Defra
Environment Agency (EA)
Natural England (NE)
Marine Management Organisation (MMO)
Rural Payments Agency (RPA)
Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA)

Additionally, it covers all areas of ICT, including data centres, cloud services, devices, software, the digital workplace, and supply chain/vendor relationships focusing on an organisational approach rather than prescribing actions for individual users.

To deliver this vision Defra have set out 6 strategic objectives that will be used to monitor the progress of this vision. These include:

Reduce and mitigate carbon emissions towards net zero targets.
Reduce the wider planetary impacts of digital services (such as water use and e-waste).
Reduce natural resource use and improve our circular economy approach.
Reduce social risk and deliver social value.
Increase transparency and accountability, internally and in the supply chain.
Improve our technology’s resilience to climate and environment risks.

These are underpinned by a cross-cutting objective to:

Embed digital sustainability as business as usual.

Defra’s Digital Sustainability team will oversee delivery, with the strategy designed to work within existing budgets and aligned with broader sustainability and procurement goals.