Sustainability is central to our ongoing success as a company. It is part of what makes Autodesk a responsible, good company. It is directly and increasingly tied to our great financial performance. And finally, helping our customers to solve some of the world’s most urgent challenges is what makes Autodesk an important company. With those aspirations in mind, we are proud to launch our first sustainability report.
As a leading provider of design and engineering software tools to 9 million architects, designers, and engineers around the world, we recognize that the single most important contribution we can make to sustainability is to provide our customers with the very best design and engineering software. Our software enables them to make smarter, more sustainable decisions—whether designing a building, highway, car, utility network, or consumer product.
The design stage is pivotal because most of a product or building’s environmental impact is fixed at that time. The decisions designers and engineers make today affect the world years, decades, or even centuries into the future. As a global community, we now understand that many of the sustainability challenges we face today reflect the unintended consequences of design decisions in the past. We didn’t intend to design products that would pollute the air and water, alter global climate systems, and consume excessive energy and natural resources. Today our context and the design constraints that need to be met have changed. We now understand that smart design is sustainable design.
At Autodesk, our mission is to simplify and democratize sustainable design. We want to make it easy for architects, engineers, and designers everywhere to make smart, more sustainable design decisions. This report describes how our 3D digital modeling technology enables customers to visualize, simulate, and analyze their designs before they are real. This enables customers to innovate in ways that save energy and optimize materials use. We have highlighted 13 customers in several different industries who are leading the way, from creating more efficient utility networks, to constructing buildings that take full advantage of natural light and cooling, to developing cars that travel more than 100 miles on a gallon of gasoline.
To further amplify our positive impacts, we partner with leading innovators who are addressing sustainable design challenges. We’re particularly proud of our collaboration with the U.S. Green Building Council, American Institute of Architects, Designers Accord, and our sponsorship of the documentary series e2: the economies of being environmentally conscious.
We are equally committed to reducing the environmental impact of our own 121 facilities worldwide and making our company a great place to work for our 7,300 employees. In this report, you’ll find extensive details about our performance in these areas.
Just as we revolutionized design more than 25 years ago when we launched AutoCAD® software, we now aspire to democratize sustainable design. Our future is being designed today, and as a company we have a unique and important role to play. We’re dedicated to and humbled by the opportunity to provide customers with design tools that will help them and their customers solve some of the most pressing global challenges of the 21st century.
Carl Bass, President and CEO, Autodesk, Inc.