American Tower Corporation (ATC) has highlighted its efforts to push sustainability, as the company revealed it has cut direct emissions by 11 percent.

The tower infrastructure's African subsidiary, ATC Africa, also reported that direct greenhouse emissions (GHG) per tower dropped by 21 percent against its 2019 baseline.

According to ATC, this was down to an "increased deployment of on-site solar power."

The progress was outlined as part of the firm's 2022 sustainability report.

ATC stated that renewable energy source hours, or the number of hours the site energy load utilized on-site solar, have nearly doubled since 2019.

As a result, the company relied on diesel generators for half as many hours of power.

The drop in GHG emissions follows an investment of approximately $300 million in energy reduction initiatives in Africa since 2018.

During this period, ATC estimates that on-site diesel consumption has decreased by nearly 43.5 million liters annually when compared to business-as-usual operations, which equates to roughly 117,000 MTCO2e (metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent) avoided.

Referring to a pilot back in 2021, which saw 80 ATC sites in Africa use a cloud-based energy management systems (EMS) program, the company said that it rolled the program to other markets a year later.

American Tower Africa CEO Marek Busfy said the effort allowed the company to continue growing in a region "where connectivity is increasingly vital but power availability and reliability are recurrently uncertain."

ATC, which operates over 220,000 telecom towers across the world, adopted science-based GHG emissions reduction goals, approved by the SBTi (Science Based Targets initiative), to improve sustainability measures.

By 2035, ATC added it wants to reduce its absolute Scope 1, 2, and 3 GHG emissions by 40 percent against a 2019 baseline.