Dive Brief:

• Mastercard’s carbon emissions declined for a third consecutive year, even as revenue increased last year, demonstrating sales growth and decarbonization efforts aren’t at odds, the card network said. 
• The card network’s emissions decreased 1% last year, even as 2025 revenue increased 16%, Mastercard Chief Sustainability Officer Ellen Jackowski and Senior Vice President of Data and Governance Adam Tenzer wrote Wednesday in an Earth Day blog. The company also reported reaching its 2025 emission reduction targets.
• Mastercard said it will release its full impact report later in the year, but the executives wrote that the relationship between earnings and decarbonization for the past three years continues to show that emissions and revenue growth can be decoupled. 

Dive Insight:

The Purchase, New York-based card network, the second-largest in the U.S. after Visa, is building on past decarbonization progress. In its sustainability report released last July, Mastercard said it was on track to surpass its 2025 goals for operational — scope 1 and 2 — emissions and its indirect — scope 3 — emissions.

Wednesday’s blog post confirms that the global payments giant exceeded both interim decarbonization targets. Mastercard has a goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2040. 

Mastercard had targeted a 38% reduction in its scope 1 and 2 emissions and a 20% reduction in its indirect emissions compared to 2016 baselines. As of the end of 2025, the card network’s operational emissions have declined 44% and its scope 3 emissions have been reduced 46% from 2016 baselines, according to Wednesday’s blog.  

“We’re encouraged by the progress we’ve made since 2016,” Jackowski and Tenzer wrote. “We also recognize the magnitude of what lies ahead.”

Mastercard — which operates the second-largest card payments network — said its sustainability strategy includes incorporating sustainability across its business operations, investing and procuring renewables and engaging its supply chain. The results prove that “environmental sustainability does not have to be a constraint on performance,” the executives wrote. 

“When you treat environmental impact as a core business objective rather than a side initiative, it strengthens the entire enterprise,” Jackowski and Tenzer wrote. “This work is inseparable from Mastercard's broader mission. The same infrastructure and practices that enable us to make progress towards decoupling growth from emissions also power the tools we offer customers.”

The company said that driving progress requires understanding and making more efficient applications, hardware and energy to power its global payments platform. 

Data centers account for the largest share of Mastercard’s operational emissions and make up 60% of the company’s scope 1 and scope 2 emissions. The technology goods and services category comprises a third of its scope 3 emissions, according to the post. 

The company said it developed a comprehensive dashboard to understand the sustainability of its products and tech assets over the past few years. There’s a patent pending for the dashboard, which provides a single score that includes metrics like real-time energy consumption by kilowatt hour, server utilization and the amount of convergence of assets onto a single server, Mastercard said.