Carbon neutrality at Cliniko in 2026

We all know the infamous stat: 70% of emissions are caused by the top 100 companies in the world. More recently, a Carbon Majors report indicated that the problem has only gotten worse. Their study found that 80% of global emissions between 2016 and 2022 were produced by just 57 corporate and state entities.

This is both depressing and unnecessary. At Cliniko, we’re strong believers that a business can consider its impact on the planet without sacrificing profitability. It’s completely practicable—if we can do it, no excuses from the corporate giants. Our goal is to try and leave the world a slightly better place, and minimising our environmental impact is a big part of this for us.

It isn’t possible to talk about environmental impact and nature preservation without mentioning the critical role that Indigenous cultures play. First Nations peoples around the world are custodians of 80% of the planet’s remaining biodiversity, according to a 2025 United Nations report. They’ve also been monitoring climate change from the beginning of human civilisation and a lot of their knowledge vastly pre-dates what modern science has only recently discovered. So first and foremost, we want to acknowledge the contributions that these diverse groups of people have made to these discussions and the ongoing role they play in protecting the natural world.

Then (2019)

In 2019, we kicked off a big project to try and reduce our carbon emissions. We approached Carbon Neutral Australia to try and determine the size of our footprint and take steps to decrease it. Jason (who does a little bit of everything behind the scenes of Cliniko) spearheaded the project and wrote about it afterwards.

In short, the process of becoming carbon neutral was a complex one. It required a lot of data collection and research—we didn’t solely focus on the emissions directly created from the Cliniko software itself but also factored in each team member’s output while working.

Omission reduction is ultimately the most desirable outcome and our goal, but even after we had the full picture of our footprint, it wasn’t possible to reduce this as much as we’d like. For example, as a fully remote team spread all around the world, our reliance on air travel is hard to minimise. We hold annual in-person get-togethers or “meet-ups” which are crucial for us being able to stay connected to each other and there’s quite a bit of flying required for this to occur. Likewise, the vast majority of our emissions come from database and web hosting and reducing this is largely beyond our control.

So the best strategy for us to achieve carbon neutrality was to offset our emissions via carbon credits. In other words, we’ve invested in projects that contribute to carbon reduction equivalent to the emissions we’ve produced. Our main investments included:

• Protecting tropical forests in Indonesia from deforestation for palm trees and preserving the natural habitat of the orangutans.
• Investing in India's renewable energy program, transitioning into wind power from coal.
• Protecting against deforestation in Brazil.

Now (2026)

Our focus on carbon neutrality is just as strong as ever. We continue to take steps to reduce Cliniko’s impact on the environment and some of the main ones include:

1Offsetting our historical emissions

After taking care of our current and future emissions, we also decided to offset all emissions from the inception of the company. This means that Cliniko is officially carbon neutral since 2010!

2AWS reduced their emissions

So we can’t really take credit for this one, but we were closely monitoring the decision of Amazon Web Services (AWS), our hosting partner, to switch to renewable energy.

3Increasing our team’s awareness

In 2023, Jason undertook some further education at Western University in London, Ontario to learn more about ways to mitigate climate change. He completed a course that combines Western and Indigenous sciences to provide insight on how humans can do better and the knowledge he gained through this has been instrumental to helping us ensure that we’re doing everything we can do to improve. Behind the scenes, we have a dedicated Slack channel (#carbon-neutrality) where we chat about this issue and continually re-evaluate what we’re doing.

4Continuing to make good choices

Evaluating our environmental impact isn’t just lip service for us—it’s part of our thinking with everything and ingrained in all our decisions. It’s a factor in any tech decisions (such as which infrastructure we choose), the ergonomic choices of our team, and how we set up our work culture events like meetups. We also practice “reduce, reuse, recycle” which, for us, means donating our old merch like t-shirts to charities.

5Keeping the conversation going!

We’ve incorporated carbon neutrality in our conversations (like this blog post!) to try and encourage other businesses to do the same. It’s true that achieving carbon neutrality was expensive, but not prohibitively so for a large company. Even for smaller businesses, there are many options to help with nature preservation that don’t require spending big bucks—even small steps can make a big difference. Volunteering for cleanup days with your team, for example, is one way to help that doesn’t cost anything.

Next

As Cliniko continues to grow, it’s inevitable that we’ll have more emissions. Monitoring and mitigating these is an ongoing process, but it’s one we’re committed to. Our planet is worth it!