Uber’s Climate Assessment and Performance Report

Our first-ever Climate Assessment and Performance Report provides city officials, users, and other stakeholders with more insight into the climate-related impacts resulting from passenger trips enabled by the Uber app. It also highlights the challenges we face and opportunities we see to achieve low-carbon mobility. We share our strategy, programs, and goals in our approach to managing these impacts, and we outline our support for policies and partnerships that can help scale sustainable mobility.

Covering nearly 4 billion rides across the US and Canada from 2017 through 2019, this report summarizes a vast amount of anonymized data from drivers and riders, gathered every 4 seconds. We have made this initial, transparent data analysis to set a baseline against which we can measure progress on delivering real, actionable solutions. Based on our current performance baseline, Uber has set ambitious improvement targets, which will in turn inform our product road map.

We believe that the environmental impact of Uber’s platform matters, and it is our responsibility to take action to improve it. Our estimates show that emissions resulting from the use of our products are the most material category of Uber’s carbon footprint. This report based on real-world use of our products provides greater transparency around our carbon impact, helping us improve our climate performance.

• Travel efficiency, which evaluates how well we help people move while minimizing car use
• Carbon intensity, which measures the emissions resulting from every passenger mile

We have bold ambition to reduce the carbon intensity of every trip facilitated by Uber to zero emissions in the next 2 decades. We cannot reach that goal without knowing where we stand today.

In the report, we identify 4 pillars of investment to drive carbon-intensity reduction across all passenger trips taken with Uber:

• Reduce empty vehicle miles (deadhead) and empty seats
• Help drivers shift to greener and electric vehicles
• Enable more car-free trips on micromobility and public transit options
• Engage users in evaluating the impact of their travel choices

We look forward to using the data in this report to reduce our carbon footprint.

Additionally, we hope the data as shared in this report contributes to and acts as a catalyst for ongoing development of sustainable transportation solutions.

Uber is one of many transportation options available to riders. Trip choice depends a lot on various local market conditions. It’s difficult to understand exactly how riders choose between transportation options, and it’s complicated to model how they would have behaved in a world where one of these modes never existed.

This report, therefore, is focused exclusively on quantifying the impact of rides from data we capture through Uber’s app and purposely avoids any counterfactual scenario modeling that would require us to make assumptions about what people do when not using our app.

Urban travel experts have confirmed that on-demand mobility, such as traditional taxi, plays a critical role in enabling more multimodal travel in cities. A recent report by TransitCenter found that consumers who increased their use of public transit over the last 2 years also walked and telecommuted more, increased their use of rideshare and taxi services, and decreased their personal car use.

We are committed to regular reporting on climate emissions and other impact areas resulting from trips on Uber. We plan to expand the geographic scope of markets covered in the report over time.