The AI genie is out of the bottle. There is no going back, but we can make it more sustainable. Here’s how.
AI is here, and it has a big footprint. As a recent article in the Guardian pointed out, AI is already a vast resource hog in its current form.
Like the intense energy consumption that the crypto mining industry experiences, the data centers that power the AI are already at par with and will soon exceed them; with AI, though, the energy consumption problem is worse for a few important reasons. The computers that power crypto mining are a big part. Of course, they use a lot of energy; they are on the fringe of legality and social acceptance. Everyone knows it. Most of us have read about someone stealing power from the grid to power illicit mining rigs.
But not so with AI.
To most who use it, using an AI like Microsoft Bing or Google Bard feels like using a search engine. You type your search term or query, and a second later, you receive the reply. Repeat and refine as you go. It seems simple and harmless; after all, the companies that run these machines are some of the most trusted household names.
You don’t search for something; you Google it.
But behind the scenes are millions upon millions of connected computers housed in large data centers. Most are in faraway places with low taxes, cheap power, and lots of free water.
Water, because it’s not just about energy anymore either; it’s now also about water as a coolant. These machines generate immense amounts of heat as they process all the information required to create the silicon functional equivalent of thousands of artificial brains. Water cooling is the best way to get the heat out of the machines. The cheapest way to do that is to have a large constant supply of fresh water that can enter the system cool and exit the system hot – bringing with it the excess heat created in the machines.
There are other unaccounted costs as well. According to Uptime Institute’s Global Data Center Survey 2021, the global data center industry replaces an estimated 2.5 million servers annually. This number will grow to 3.2 million servers by 2025. Sure, some are recycled, but if the number is the same as general electronic waste, only 17.4% of servers are recycled, and the vast majority end up as e-waste.
Despite this bleak picture, I’m confident it will get sorted quickly. At a glance, the focused use of renewable energy generation for data centers is an evident and technologically-ready solution. Solar power installation is currently 90% cheaper than ten years ago and is still falling, even during this inflation period.
The cost of solar panels has fallen by about 80% in the past ten years. This is due to the increasing efficiency of solar cells and the economies of scale achieved in the solar manufacturing industry. The cost of other components, such as inverters and mounting systems, has also fallen in recent years. Governments in many countries have offered financial incentives to encourage the adoption of solar power. These incentives have helped to reduce the cost of solar power installation due to a surge in availability and local production of high-quality solar panels.
In the case of data centers, the energy required will come from renewables and will not have the same footprint as it did five or even ten years ago. In some cases, the energy consumed will have a net zero or possibly a negative carbon footprint.
Solution Water
Closed-circuit geothermal cooling systems are an evident and easy-to-implement solution for water consumption. Rather than using the cold water from a river or reservoir and risk heating and damaging natural river and lake systems, geothermal systems can create a contained and efficient cooling system.
For smaller systems, a ground-source heat pump would suffice. This type of system uses a series of pipes that are buried in the ground to extract or transfer heat. The pipes are filled with thermal conductive fluid that is cooled by the ground. The cooled fluid is then circulated through the data center and used to cool the servers inside.
For larger systems, a water-source heat pump would provide cooling. This type of system uses water pumped from a well into the data center to extract heat and cool the servers. The heated water is pumped back into the well to be cooled by the Earth, and the cycle begins again, with the only operational cost being the pumps that circulate the water.
Geothermal systems are very efficient at extracting or transferring heat. This can help to save energy and money on cooling costs. Geothermal systems can run on renewable energy, so do not produce any emissions and do not cause immediate damage to riparian areas, so they are considered environmentally friendly. Finally, geothermal systems are very reliable and can operate for many years without any problems and require little maintenance and can last for up to 50 years in ideal conditions.
Solution Hardware Churn
The automatic and mindless replacement of millions of servers worldwide seems flawed. Indeed, there are business critical machines that must be replaced to have 100% uptime, but applying that mentality to all servers is extreme and flawed. It results in unnecessary waste of machines that are still fit to function, until something fails.
The servers could be made to last longer. Currently, due to technology upgrades and other factors, the average lifespan of a server is only 3-5 years. The major hardware components of servers could easily be designed to last 20 or more years with only upgrades to specific components as technology increases. This would ensure they maintain valuable and relevant for the longest period of time and would save enormous amounts of valuable hardware resources from ending up in the waste pile.
The components and systems that must be replaced could be recycled more effectively, with much of the precious elements recaptured for reuse in new components. Similar to the recycling systems now being deployed by ROSI in France for solar panels, the same process could be applied to servers and their components. In the ROSI system, 99% of the elements in a solar panel can be recaptured. Severs have a variety of precious elements inside them; a high-efficiency recycling process would recapture gold, silver, platinum, copper, and palladium.
A Bigger (Flawed) Picture
The bigger problem is the fact that the current AI business model is flawed. Most AI programs are run as typical capitalist profit machines, only open to the public as toys and tools for writing or entertainment. The is a gold rush mentality right now where all the players are vying for position and the attention of investors.
To be successful, therefore, they need to exploit resources (energy, water, and hardware) as cheaply as possible to make the product that they sell for as high a price as possible. If the actual cost of the energy and water were factored in – cost to society and the planet – many of these so-called profit centers would disappear overnight.
It is hard to believe that some of the largest companies in the world, which, through the application of proprietary AI, are fundamentally changing the way humans live and work, are not paying their fair share of taxes. These companies are making billions of dollars in profits while striking deals with governments to avoid paying the true costs of running their businesses.
They set up in low or no-tax jurisdictions manipulating local governments who make concessions to normal business applications based on the promise of offshoots or trickle-down economic benefits, such as jobs and ancillary services. But if the situation becomes less than favorable, these mega companies leave town and move on to the next host like a parasite.
This is no different from many other subsidized, so-called capitalist businesses. Most of the fossil fuel industry, bottled water, junk food, wheat, soy, automotive, and many other industries would simply not have a business case if the actual cost of production was felt. If the real cost to operate an AI data center were factored in, fewer people would be using it. That could be a good thing.
Do we need to rely on AI more than we do already? Let’s be real; we were able to communicate, make recipes, plan our trips, and all the other things before AI; there is no reason we can’t do it now too.
The Solution
If there was a requirement for AI companies to manage their own environmental impact, for real, and if there were strict controls on the use of AI. It could begin to be used for a higher purpose. It would be used for things like reducing the effects of climate change, developing drought-resistant crops, fixing broken cities, improving the welfare of developing nations, or for medical advances like less invasive therapies, advanced antibiotics, and vaccines.
The best part is that all this is possible and happening now. Many governments are placing tighter restrictions on the use of AI, and others are forcing big corporate consumers to include a full accounting of all their combined footprints. These days, the responsible corporation includes details of all aspects of its footprint. AI is already being used for the benefit of society and the planet, we just need to find the right balance of use and benefit, and I believe we can; it’s just a matter of time.
Knowing that makes me very hopeful for the future and the use of AI.
One bad apple may not spoil the whole bunch, but when it comes to distributing food, a lot of good goes out with the bad.
Now, researchers from Princeton University and Microsoft Research have developed a fast and accurate way to determine fruit quality, piece by piece, using high-frequency wireless technology. The new tool gives suppliers a way to sort fruit based on fine-grained ripeness measurements. It promises to help cut food waste by optimizing distribution: good fruit picked from bad bunches, ripe fruit moved to the front of the line.
Current methods to determine ripeness are either unreliable, overly broad, too time-consuming or too expensive to implement at large scales, according to the new study, presented Oct. 3 at the 2023 ACM MobiCom conference on networking and mobile computing.
“There is no systematic way of determining the ripeness status of fruits and vegetables,” said Yasaman Ghasempour, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton and one of the study’s principal investigators. “It is mostly random visual inspection, where you check one fruit out of the box on distribution lines and estimate its quality through physical contact or color change.”
But this kind of visual inspection leads to poor estimates much of the time, she said. Rather than rely on how the peel looks or how it feels to the touch, advanced wireless signals can effectively peek under the surface of a piece of fruit and reveal richer information about its quality.
Roughly one-third of all food produced in the United States gets tossed each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Worldwide, the United Nations has estimated that half of all fruits and vegetables go to waste. The new study’s authors say inefficiency at this scale is only seen in the food industry, and that automated, noninvasive and scalable technologies can play a role in reducing all that waste.
“When we look at the global challenges around food security, nutrition and environmental sustainability, the issue of food waste plays a major role,” said Ranveer Chandra, the Managing Director of Research for Industry and CTO of Agri-Food at Microsoft. He said the amount of food wasted each year could feed more than a billion people. And that food waste accounts for nearly 6% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. “If we could reduce food waste, it would help feed the population, reduce malnutrition, and help mitigate the impact of climate change,” Chandra said.
The team, led by Ghasempour and Chandra, developed a system for determining ripeness using wireless signals in the sub-terahertz band that can scan fruit on a conveyor belt. The sub-terahertz signals—between microwave and infrared—interact with the fruit in ways that can be measured in fine detail, leading to readouts of sugar and dry matter content beneath the surface of the fruit’s skin.
Next-generation wireless systems, like the coming 6G standards, will be designed to accommodate new high-frequency bands such as terahertz and sub-terahertz signals, the researchers said. But while these bands have begun to spark new communication technologies, the Princeton-Microsoft technique is one of the first to leverage these signals for sensing, particularly for smart food sensing.
As fruit continues to ripen after harvest, its physical, chemical and electrical properties also change. Bananas yellow. Grapes wrinkle. Avocados darken. But for a lot of fruit, it is hard to know how those outward markers correlate to actual ripeness or quality. Anyone who has bitten into a perfectly shiny red apple only to find it mealy and dry understands this disparity.
When a sub-terahertz pulse impinges on a piece of fruit, its rays go more than skin deep. Some frequencies get absorbed, others get reflected, and a lot of frequencies do a little of both with varying intensity. The reflection creates its own signal across a range of frequencies, and that signal has a detailed and specific shape—a signature. By modeling the physics of these interactions and procuring a lot of data, the researchers were able to use that signature to reveal the fruit’s ripeness status.
“It was really challenging to develop a model for this,” Ghasempour said. She said fruits’ many structural layers—seeds, pulp, skin—added complexity to the problem, as well as variations in size, thickness, orientation and texture. “So, we performed some wave modeling and simulations, and then augmented those insights with the data that we collected.”
In the experiment, they used persimmons, avocados and apples. Fruits with smooth skins are easiest to measure. The bumpiness of, say, an avocado reflects a weaker signal and produces unwanted effects. But the researchers found ways to get around the bumpiness problem and say that with enough data the method can be applied to most fruits.
They believe this tool can be extended to other kinds of foods, too—including meats and beverages—by using different kinds of physiological markers. Those extended use cases could have big implications for food safety monitoring and consumer choice.
Microsoft and McKinsey are combining their tech and sustainability expertise to help businesses measure and reduce their overall carbon footprint
Microsoft and McKinsey have joined forces to help organisations with a scalable technology solution to help in the fight against climate change.
The integrated solution combines sustainability data intelligence from Microsoft Sustainability Manager with decarbonisation planning and an execution engine using McKinsey Sustainability’s Catalyst Zero.
According to the two companies, this technological collaboration will enhance companies’ sustainability transformations by integrating their data from activities that produce emissions with initiatives to abate them.
“Urgent and decisive action to curtail emissions is needed if we are to reach net zero by 2050. By combining our tech and sustainability expertise and experience, Microsoft and McKinsey will help businesses accurately and swiftly measure and reduce their overall carbon footprint,” says Tomas Nauclér, senior partner at McKinsey and global co-leader of McKinsey Sustainability.
Using sustainability knowledge to meet specific needs
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is the company’s first horizontal industry cloud designed to work across multiple industries. Its solutions can be customised to specific industry needs, whether a customer is in retail, energy, manufacturing, or another industry.
The new solution is powered by Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, and it uses Sustainability Manager to automate and scale the collection of companies’ sustainability-related data and support establishing an emission baseline. Following that, McKinsey’s Catalyst Zero solution, which draws on sustainability expertise and experience, provides a holistic understanding of emissions at company, product and value chain levels, and helps leaders create a detailed decarbonisation plan by leveraging a vast proprietary library of decarbonization levers.
The ongoing data feed between Microsoft’s and McKinsey’s solutions regularly monitors whether the impact forecasted in the decarbonisation plan is happening as planned. The joint solution is powered with tens of thousands of emission factors and decarbonisation levers across 70+ industry sectors to rapidly quantify baseline emissions, generate a company-specific Marginal Abatement Cost Curve (MACC), and also plan and track granular decarbonisation initiatives.
“We are focused on accelerating progress to achieve a more sustainable future, and our collaboration with McKinsey, to deliver innovative Cloud for Sustainability solutions will help customers unify their data intelligence, build robust IT infrastructure and gain insights into their overall carbon footprint in order to help them develop and execute robust decarbonisation strategies to achieve their sustainability goals,” says Elisabeth Brinton, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Sustainability.
As AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud work toward their carbon-free and net zero carbon emissions goals, they’re also helping their customers understand their own cloud-related carbon footprints and take steps to reduce their impacts.
All three have released tools that, in varying degrees, measure estimated carbon emissions tied to individual customers’ cloud infrastructure and services usage and help them work more sustainably. Enterprises can use those tools to make and track progress toward their carbon-reduction targets and meet environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) reporting requirements.
Cloud providers’ data centers are energy-intensive, and the electricity used to run them generates greenhouse gas emissions: primarily carbon dioxide, which is tied to global warming.
“Consumers, employees, investors and policymakers are demanding that organizations prioritize sustainability and be transparent about the impact they’re having on the environment and the progress they’re making on their sustainability initiatives,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said during the cloud provider’s inaugural Sustainability Summit last month.
For cloud customers, it comes down to “map, measure, reduce,” said Christopher Wellise, AWS’ director of sustainability. Customers need to map their operational boundaries, use tools to measure the carbon impact and then create targets and strategies for reduction.
“Then it’s look for ways to transform their own business — what products are they innovating, what are their customers looking for — and begin to embed sustainability into their innovation practices,” Wellise told Protocol.
Christopher Wellise, AWS’ director of sustainabilityPhoto: AWS
It’s unclear how last month’s Supreme Court ruling, which limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate emissions from existing coal- and natural gas-fired power plants, will impact enterprises’ plans. But the Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled proposed rule changes in March that would force public companies to make certain climate-related risk disclosures, including their emissions, to provide greater transparency for investors.
Either way, certain large multinational companies and financial institutions doing business or investing capital in Europe still face sustainability requirements under EU rules, even if they’re U.S.-based, according to Elisabeth Brinton, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of sustainability.
“The EU made their jurisdictional authority for sustainability very similar to GDPR and privacy,” Brinton told Protocol. “So the market and where we have to go in terms of enabling not only carbon emissions reductions, but then across ESG more broadly, actually flows through and across to the U.S. companies that are global. It touches down into your cost centers, regardless of where they are.”
Here’s a look at how the Big Three cloud providers have been moving toward their carbon goals and helping customers decarbonize their applications and infrastructure, and how other technology companies are jumping into the business.
AWS
Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge in 2019, committing to achieve net zero carbon emissions across its businesses by 2040, including plans to power its operations with 100% renewable energy.
“We have a 2030 target of reaching 100% renewable energy, but we’re actually five years ahead of schedule,” Wellise said.
Amazon bills itself as the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy. It’s announced more than 310 renewable projects globally, including wind and solar farms, that it says will have the capacity to deliver more than 42,000 gigawatt hours of renewable energy annually – enough to power more than 3.9 million U.S. homes per year.
Enterprises can start to reduce their carbon emissions just by moving their workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud, according to Wellise.
“There are big benefits, obviously, just moving into cloud primarily, and then there are some things we’re doing once you’re within cloud to help optimize workloads for customers, which further drives down their carbon footprint,” he said.
On the demand side, AWS designed its own semiconductor chips to run specific workloads and further drive energy efficiencies in its data center infrastructure, Wellise noted. They include its Arm-based AWS Graviton processors. Graviton3-based compute instances use up to 60% less energy for the same performance than comparable instances using Intel or AMD chips, according to AWS.
“We’re really achieving huge economies of scale,” Wellise said, pointing to AWS-commissioned 451 Research studies that found AWS’ infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy-efficient than the median of surveyed U.S. enterprise data centers and up to five times more energy-efficient than average data centers in Europe and Asia. “Two-thirds of that is accomplished through our economies of scale and specific hardware design, and the other third of that is driven by our renewable energy programs. What that results in is up to an 80% reduction in carbon footprint associated with our customers’ workloads.”
AWS’ Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, which became generally available in March, allows customers to see the estimated carbon impacts of their AWS workloads down to the service level for its EC2 compute service and S3 storage service. Customers also can get an estimate of the carbon emissions they avoided by using AWS instead of on-premises data centers, a calculation based on the 451 Research report findings.
The Customer Carbon Footprint Tool shows AWS’ Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions associated with a customer’s cloud use from January 2020 onward. Scope 1 emissions come directly from AWS’ operations, such as the energy consumed by its data centers; Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy, such as the production of electricity used to power AWS facilities.
The dashboard calculates those emissions monthly, but the data is reported on a three-month delay due to billing cycles of AWS’ electric utilities suppliers. Customers can measure changes in their carbon footprints over time as they deploy new resources on the cloud and review forecasted emissions based on their current usage and AWS’ renewable energy project road map.
The Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, which is available in AWS’ billing console, uses the Greenhouse Gas Protocol accounting standards.
“Whether it’s governments, nonprofits, other organizations that are using our services, many of them are involved in either mandatory or voluntary related carbon reporting,” Wellise said. “And if they’re a large SaaS provider or somebody that has a large percentage of their footprint tied up in IT, it’s really important that they understand what that footprint is.”
But since the tool’s rollout, AWS has been drawing some criticism for its lack of transparency, such as not disclosing its Scope 3 emissions and aggregating emissions data by the broader geographies instead of breaking it down at a cloud-region level. RedMonk analyst James Governor referred to it as a “Version One product,” saying an API would help developers build carbon tracking functionality into their apps or access the emissions data via their preferred command line tools or editors.
“The calculator also doesn’t initially have an easy way to compare and model carbon intensity in different regions — that’s something that we will hopefully see sooner rather than later,” Governor wrote in April. “Instead, the calculator is initially positioned to illustrate the benefits of AWS hosting over self-hosting in your own data centres. Reasonable enough, but the real charm will be when customers can make better decisions about the sustainability of their cloud workloads.”
Wellise acknowledged that customers would like more regional granularity and an API to parse the emissions data on their own. Including Scope 3 emissions and “further definition for regional differences” are on AWS’ road map, according to an AWS spokesperson.
Once customers get their carbon data, the conversation moves to optimization, according to Wellise. In March, AWS added a Sustainability Pillar to its Well-Architected Framework, which provides a set of best practices for designing and operating workloads in the AWS cloud.
“They can actually drive down and architect workloads in a way that they optimize for carbon,” Wellise said.
Microsoft
Rival Microsoft has set a goal to become carbon-negative by 2030. Two years ago, it announced a $1 billion climate innovation fund to spur development of carbon reduction, capture and removal technologies, and Climeworks is among its investments. Microsoft this month signed a 10-year agreement under which Climeworks, which specializes in direct air-capture, will permanently remove 10,000 tons of carbon emissions from the atmosphere on its behalf. And last month, the Microsoft Climate Research Initiative launched with a focus on overcoming constraints to decarbonization, reducing uncertainties in carbon accounting and assessing climate risks in greater detail.
For customers, Microsoft’s Cloud for Sustainability became generally available in June as a set of ESG capabilities from across its cloud portfolio, including Office 365 products such as Excel as well as products and services from partners.
More than 60% of sustainability-related data from global enterprises sits in Excel, according to Brinton.
By pulling together enterprises’ Excel data and edge or IoT data, the Cloud for Sustainability provides an extensible data platform for unified data models and for turning that data into actionable insights that drive “double bottom line of corporate performance, along with actual measurable impact around ESG,” she said.
Elisabeth Brinton, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of sustainability, said even U.S. companies face EU climate rules.Photo: Microsoft
Microsoft’s Sustainability Manager app is a baseline tool to help customers get a handle on their Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, according to Brinton. It automates data collection, centralizing disparate data into a common format to enable customers to record, monitor, analyze and report their emissions in near real time, and set and track sustainability targets.
“A typical enterprise is going to have well over 100,000 different cost centers, and so being able to pull up and actually report and understand exactly your carbon emissions status by cost center — that’s a huge data science challenge,” Brinton said.
Microsoft’s Emissions Impact Dashboard for Azure became generally available last October. The Power BI application lets customers track, report and reduce the carbon emissions associated with their Azure cloud usage. Its dashboard lets customers drill down into Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions by month, service and data-center region, and enter non-migrated workloads to get estimates of emissions savings from migrating to Azure.
“It helps them with critical insights, helps them make informed, data-driven decisions about their own sustainable computing,” Brinton said. “It is a really, really great tool that gives you that real-time information.”
Microsoft’s Emissions Impact Dashboard for Microsoft 365, which allows customers to track GHG emissions tied to their use of applications including Microsoft Teams and Exchange Online, is in preview.
Microsoft also is continuing to focus on opportunities for sustainable low-code, no-code options, according to Brinton.
“Low-code/no-code is an example of a method that you can actually derive sustainable improvements [from] because you’re actually lowering the energy intensity, as it were, of your ability to develop code or compute,” she said.
Google Cloud
Google Cloud, which says it’s been carbon-neutral since 2007, has matched 100% of its electricity consumption with renewable energy since 2017 and maintains it operates the “cleanest cloud.” Its “moonshot” goal is to use carbon-free energy 24/7 in all of its data centers and offices by 2030 — which means it would match its electricity use with carbon-free energy for every hour in every region where it operates — as part of its goal to reach net zero emissions across its operations that year.
Google Cloud’s Carbon Footprint, in preview as of last October, allows customers to measure, report and reduce their carbon emissions by providing the gross carbon emissions associated with the electricity from their Google Cloud Platform usage. Customers can monitor their cloud emissions by product, project and region. Google Cloud is adding Scope 1 and 3 emissions to that reporting data.
“In addition to accounting for our customers’ Scope 2 emissions associated with the production of the energy that we use, customers will also be able to access data on the emissions from the sources we control directly, as well as the relevant emissions of Google’s Scope 3 apportioned to customer usage,” Justin Keeble, managing director of global sustainability at Google Cloud, told reporters in a briefing last month. “This will give our customers the most comprehensive view possible of the emissions associated with their cloud usage.”
Google Cloud’s Carbon Footprint allows customers to measure, report and reduce their carbon emissions.Image: Google Cloud
Customers can export data from Carbon Footprint to Google Cloud’s BigQuery data warehouse to perform analytics and visualizations, in addition to using the data for sustainability reporting requirements. Google Cloud publishes its calculation methodology so auditors and reporting teams can verify that data meets Greenhouse Gas Protocol frameworks for measuring emissions. Non-technical users of Google Cloud, such as sustainability teams, also will be able to access the data for reporting purposes.
Early next year, Google Cloud plans to release Carbon Footprint for Google Workspace (its cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools) so customers can understand emissions associated with products including Gmail and Google Meet and Docs.
Carbon Footprint is part of Google Cloud’s Carbon Sense collection of tools that includes features from products such as Active Assist — its tools for customers to optimize their cloud operations — and Region Picker. Google Cloud added a sustainability category to Active Assist, and its unattended project recommender uses machine learning to estimate the gross carbon emissions that customers can save if they remove abandoned or idle cloud resources.
“In addition to intentionally shortening resource schedules, you can also proactively delete unused VMs, optimize VM shapes, as well as shut down inactive projects,” said Alexandrina Garcia Verdin, a cloud and sustainability developer relations engineer at Google Cloud. “This is where the Active Assist tool really shines, as it proactively suggests carbon-reducing configurations, along with other cost-performance and security-friendly actions.”
One of the most impactful steps a customer can take to reduce cloud-related emissions is using Region Picker to select cloud regions powered by cleaner energy, Keeble said. Google Cloud last year unveiled the carbon characteristics of its cloud regions and icons identifying low-carbon cloud regions so customers can choose “cleaner” ones for their work. Region Picker helps customers compare priorities around lowering emissions versus pricing and latency.
Google Cloud also has introduced low-carbon mode, which lets customers automatically restrict their cloud resources to low-carbon locations across Google Cloud infrastructure with a few clicks.
“Setting defaults can really just simplify the number of priorities put on developers while still ensuring the apps they build run on as low carbon infrastructure as possible,” Kate Brandt, Google’s chief sustainability officer, said during the Sustainability Summit. “For organizations where digital infrastructure is a considerable part of their supply chain footprint, prioritizing sustainable infrastructure … can really make a huge difference.”
Salesforce, a Google Cloud customer that’s been prioritizing low-carbon infrastructure, expects to reduce its yearly gross emissions of certain workloads by roughly 80% with Google Cloud, Brandt said.
Google Cloud is sharing 24/7 carbon-free energy data with customers under a new pilot program announced last month. The information, collected by Google Cloud and its partners over 10 years, includes historical and real-time regional energy grid and carbon data at hourly levels. Customers will be able to see their electricity emissions profile, baseline their carbon-free energy (CFE) score and their Scope 2 emissions footprint from indirect GHG emissions, and forecast and plan for an optimized energy portfolio to achieve its desired CFE score, including by executing carbon-free energy transactions.
The cloud provider last month also rolled out Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability, a new validation program for partners with products and services on Google Cloud that assist customers in achieving sustainability goals, including reducing carbon emissions, increasing the sustainability of their value chains and processing ESG data. The products and services will be available through a new Google Cloud Marketplace Sustainability Hub.
Other efforts
Other companies also are jumping into the mix. Alibaba Cloud last month released Energy Expert, software for customers to manage the carbon emissions of their operations and products. Cloud Carbon Footprint, an open-source project sponsored by Thoughtworks, provides tooling to measure, monitor and reduce cloud carbon emissions, including embodied emissions from manufacturing, and works for multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Cirrus Nexus, which has an artificial intelligence-driven cloud management platform, in May launched TrueCarbon, a carbon-reduction tool that currently works for AWS and Microsoft Azure.
“We look at actual consumption,” Cirrus Nexus CEO Chris Noble told Protocol. “We just don’t take a database or a virtual machine or some sort of workload and say, ‘OK, this is about how much carbon.’ We actually look at it in five-minute increments. We don’t rely on the reporting of the CSP [cloud service provider]. Our interest isn’t driving utilization or driving efficiency in their data centers. Our goal is to give our customers a very clear, honest view of how much carbon they’re causing to be produced, regardless of what offsets, what carbon credits CSPs buy.”
TrueCarbon uses real-time information from energy production data that’s published on an hourly basis for the U.S., U.K. and EU, according to Noble.
“Every hour, we know what that composition on the energy grid is,” he said. “We know how much of the energy is nuclear, coal, wind, solar. So every five minutes, we look at how much power they’re consuming per workload, and then we translate that to how much energy it’s consuming off the grid. And we translate how much carbon that’s caused to be produced by consuming that energy.”
TrueCarbon also allows customers to automate changes, according to Noble.
“If a company really wanted to get aggressive about it, we can move their workloads from region to region to get the best carbon efficiency,” he said. “Our tool will actually go out and make those changes for them on the fly.”
Cloud providers pour billions of dollars into their data centers and have a vested interest in driving business through them, even if they’re not as environmentally sound as data centers in other cloud regions, Noble said.
“They built data centers where there’s … lots of reliance on coal and oil and natural gas,” he said. “They’re not going to fold them up tomorrow. We believe things like carbon credits are helpful and they’re good, they draw attention, but they don’t really solve anything. Carbon offsets like planting trees, you know it’s good, but it doesn’t really change the amount of carbon being produced.”
The tech giant first announced an intention to source carbon removal solutions from Climeworks in January 2021, a year after pledging to achieve carbon-negative operations and supply chains by 2030. To achieve this 2030 goal, Microsoft – which is already carbon-neutral in operations – intends to halve emissions this decade and invest to offset and remove more carbon than it emits annually.
This week, Climeworks confirmed that it has entered into a ten-year purchase agreement with Microsoft. The investment in the deal has not been disclosed at this stage, but Climeworks claims it is “one of the largest” in the DAC space and will support the removal of “tens of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere”.
“Microsoft’s multi-year offtake agreement with Climeworks is an important step towards realizing the ‘net’ in net zero,” said Microsoft’s chief environmental officer Lucas Joppa. “Our experience in purchasing renewable energy shows that long-term agreements can provide an essential foundation for society’s race to scale new decarbonisation technologies.”
Pictured: Climeworks’ Orca DAC plant in Iceland. Image: Climeworks
Other corporate supporters of Climeworks include Ocado, Swiss RE, Audi, LGT and Stripe, the latter of which is spearheading a collaborative private sector commitment on scaling carbon capture technologies. Called ‘Frontier’, the collaboration is backed by $925m of commitments to purchase carbon removals using man-made technologies this decade.
Technology scale-up
Climeworks currently operates 17 DAC plants, including one, Orca, which is operating on a commercial basis. Orca came online in September 2021 and is based in Hellisheiði, Iceland. Its CO2 removal capacity is 4,000 tonnes per year.
Last month, Climeworks confirmed plans for its 18th and largest plant to date – Mammoth, also in the same Icelandic region. The plant is expected to begin operations in either late 2023 or early 2024. In the first instance, it will have a CO2 capture capacity of 36,000 tonnes per year. Climeworks is aiming to scale to two megatonnes of capacity by 2030, laying the foundations for scaling to a gigatonne of capture capacity by 2050.
Climeworks’ technology works by drawing air into a collector with a fan. Inside the collector, CO2 is filtered out. When the filter is full, the collector is closed and heated to release the CO2, ready for concentration and storage by storage partner Carbfix. The carbon associated with developing and operating the DAC facilities, Climeworks claims, is typically equivalent to 10% of the carbon that will be captured. This calculation considers the fact that the facilities are powered by renewable energy.
Microsoft’s Joppa has called DAC “a nascent but crucial industry” to achieve the halving of net global emissions by 2030 and bringing them to net-zero by 2050 – the levels recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for giving humanity the best chance to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5C.
Indeed, some climate scientists have concluded that large-scale carbon capture – whether man-made or nature-based – is needed at scale to avert the worst physical impacts of climate change due to historic and continuing emissions. The IPCC itself has stated that, by 2050, the world’s air-based carbon removal capacity should be 3-12 billion tonnes in a net-zero world.
However, as Joppa acknowledged, man-made systems are in their relative infancy commercially. Critics are concerned that they may not deliver their promised benefits and could be used as a means for businesses to avoid reducing their emissions in the first instance.
ETC report
In related news, the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) has this week published a new report outlining its recommendations for scaling carbon capture, storage and utilisation (CCUS) technologies while ensuring that efforts around zero-carbon electricity and emissions reductions are not de-prioritised.
That report forecasts that, in 2050, the world will need 7-10 gigatonnes of CO2 capture. This is at the higher end of the levels recommended by the IPCC. Reaching this scale, the ETC argues, cannot be dependent on action in the mid or long-term – concerted efforts are needed this decade, with the backing of both public and private finance.
Overall, the ETC sees a “vital but limited” role for CCUS. Its report sets out how the carbon removals provided by these technologies should be prioritised for sectors which are hard to decarbonise, such as heavy industry, and should be scaled most rapidly in the sectors and locations where CCUS has an economic advantage over other decarbonisation solutions.
The ETC has been a vocal supporter of CCUS in recent years. In March, it released a separate report recommending that the global CCUS capacity reaches 3.5 billion tonnes annually by 2030.
DAVOS, Switzerland — Davos is living up to its name as a place for movers and shakers. On Wednesday, a group known as the First Movers Coalition announced major climate commitments intended to create markets for everything from green steel and aluminum to carbon dioxide removal.
Microsoft, Alphabet and Salesforce are among the heavy hitters in tech at the forefront of the coalition that includes more than 50 companies with a total market cap of $8.5 trillion. That’s a large chunk of the U.S. stock market, and the pledge means those companies will start procuring climate-friendly products that are more expensive than their standard counterparts as well as services that don’t really exist at scale (yet). The companies’ commitments could give industries that we know we need to grow down the road the confidence that demand will be there.
The coalition launched last year at United Nations climate talks as an initiative spearheaded by Climate Envoy John Kerry and Bill Gates. The focus then was mostly on steel, shipping and aviation, all sectors of the economy that are incredibly hard and costly to decarbonize. Wednesday’s announcement threw CDR — Silicon Valley’s favorite climate solution — into the mix, along with green aluminum.
“Today is a great milestone in a very difficult long-term project,” Bill Gates said.
Indeed, the trio of major tech companies collectively committed $500 million to CDR between now and 2030. Alphabet joined a handful of other tech companies in pledging $925 million to purchase CDR services last month. It didn’t respond to Protocol’s request about if its First Movers Coalition money was the same as its commitment to Frontier, but Bloomberg confirmed the $200 million is the same money. Microsoft has also made its own investments in removing carbon from the atmosphere while Salesforce founder Marc Benioff has invested in companies that do so.
Right now, a handful of startups are removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using techniques ranging from protecting forests to growing kelp to relying on machines to do the dirty work. Paying those companies to do that is currently pretty pricey, costing hundreds of dollars per ton. That adds up fast when you’re talking about a company that pumps millions of tons of carbon dioxide per year into the atmosphere when factoring in Scope 3 emissions.
Obviously Alphabet, Salesforce and Microsoft are good for it, though, and their early investments could help bring prices down by signaling there’s going to be a market for CDRl. At numerous events at the World Economic Forum this week, Kerry echoed a phrase coined by Gates called the “green premium,” which refers to the idea of paying extra for the more climate-friendly option. For companies, that can refer to paying a bit of extra cash for green steel or CDR. (Though to be clear, there’s no alternative to the latter outside cutting emissions.)
“No government has the money to be able to solve this problem by itself,” Kerry said. “No government can move fast enough to solve this problem by itself. We need you. We need the private sector around the world to step up.”
While that first point is a bit up for debate given that the federal budget for the military alone is north of $700 billion per year, it’s clear that procurement is a huge avenue for both corporations and the government to spur new markets and bring down costs of the technology we need to address the climate crisis. The Biden administration itself has pulled on some of those levers, notably with a plan to purchase only electric vehicles by 2035. With 645,000 vehicles, that would help drive costs down for batteries, charging and other parts of the EV equation.
The government is also investing billions in direct air capture R&D, which could bring down costs. But tech companies’ commitment to buying those services offer another avenue to do that. Right now, most tech can remove maybe a few thousands of tons from the atmosphere a year. To keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a key guardrail, the world will need to pull multiple billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the sky each year in the coming decades. Exactly how much will depend on how fast we deploy renewables, EVs and other climate solutions we already have at the ready.
Kerry noted that the government partners in the First Movers Coalition are also working to create more regulatory certainty and policies that can speed the adoption of new, cleaner technologies. Tax credits and even more R&D investments are some of the avenues that could open the door to reimagining polluting industries and creating new sectors of the economy to clean up the carbon pollution already in the atmosphere.
The new commitment from the First Movers Coalition will give CDR companies a little more certainty that the market will develop for their services. That, in addition to commitments for green steel and aluminum as well as other products, is, in Kerry’s words, the “highest-leverage climate action that companies can take, because creating the early markets to scale advanced technologies materially reduces the whole world’s emissions.”
Chief sustainability officers are all the rage. Tech companies are hiring them left and right and holding them up as the human talismans of their commitment to fighting climate change, one (sometimes dubious) net zero goal at a time.
In some cases, CSOs have real power to bring companies in line with their climate ambitions. But in others, they are window dressing. To get at where CSOs are able to exact real change, we looked at eight major tech companies’ reporting structures and whether or not executive compensation is tied to meeting sustainability goals.
Giving a CSO a direct line to the CEO not only empowers them to actually make real changes to the way a business operates, it also sends a clear signal to the rest of the company that sustainability is a central part of the business plan and not an afterthought. According to a survey of CSOs by Deloitte and the Institute of International Finance, 32% report directly to the CEO, and 13% report to the head of marketing.
“If you’re reporting to the head of marketing and you’re trying to influence someone in risk, you’re pushing a boulder uphill. They’re going to perceive what you do as a marketing campaign, when really you’re aiming for strategic transformation,” one of the surveyed CSOs told Deloitte.
In Tim Mohin’s view, the role of the CSO is “changing rapidly.” In the past, corporate sustainability used to be much more of a marketing issue, and now it sits more in the financial risk and business strategy side of things, according to Mohin, the CSO at carbon management startup Persefoni who has literally written the book on corporate sustainability. For a company to have a true commitment to sustainability, its CSO needs to understand how the business operates from a corporate risk and finance perspective, so that they can have the authority and credibility to make real change. Mohin believes it’s better for a CSO to start off with a solid background in business or product area expertise, then build in the ESG knowledge rather than working the other way around.
Kentaro Kawamori, Persefoni’s CEO, agrees with his CSO’s assessment. Questions to ask of companies to really ascertain the strength of their commitments include whether or not they’re linking executive pay to decarbonization, if they’re hiring people with the right sustainability credentials or if, in Kawamori’s words, they’re “just putting a PR person into the job.”
Here are the chief sustainability officers at some of the biggest tech companies we’re watching here at Protocol.
Google
Who: Kate Brandt, chief sustainability officer
Background and responsibilities: Brandt leads sustainability across Google’s worldwide operations, products and supply chain. According to a Google blog post, that means she coordinates with data centers, real estate and product teams “to ensure the company capitalizes on opportunities to strategically advance sustainability.” Before starting at Google in 2015, she was appointed by former President Barack Obama as the Federal Environmental Executive and was the U.S.’s first Federal Chief Sustainability Officer, responsible for promoting sustainability across the federal government.
Reporting structure: Brandt reports to Ellen West, Google’s vice president of Engagement within the office of the CFO, who in turn reports to CFO Ruth Porat. Brandt also reports in a dotted line to Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president for Technical Infrastructure.
Compensation: Google announced in a public disclosure that it is introducing a bonus program for members of its senior executive team that will be determined in part by performance supporting the company’s ESG goals beginning this year.
Microsoft
Who: Lucas Joppa, chief environmental officer
Background and responsibilities: Joppa leads the development and execution of Microsoft’s sustainability strategy across its worldwide business. He has a Ph.D. in ecology and is a highly cited researcher. (He has an h-index of 45 for those of you academic nerds keeping count.) Before this position, he was Microsoft’s first chief environmental scientist, founding the AI for Earth program.
Reporting structure: Joppa reports to Brad Smith, president and vice chair of Microsoft.
Compensation: Microsoft announced in 2021 that progress on sustainability goals is part of executive compensation. This is adding onto the practice the company’s had since 2016 to tie a portion of executive pay to ESG measures, starting with diversity representation gains. This applies to members of the senior leadership team, including CEO Satya Nadella.
Meta
Who: Edward Palmieri, director of Global Sustainability
Background and responsibilities: Palmieri leads Meta’s global sustainability team of more than 30 professionals, who are responsible for developing and executing the company’s strategy on environmental and responsible supply chain issues, according to his LinkedIn. Prior to this role, he was Meta’s associate general counsel focused on privacy issues. Prior to that, he was the deputy chief privacy officer at Sprint.
Reporting structure: Palmieri reports to Rachel Peterson, Meta’s vice president of Infrastructure.
Compensation: Executive compensation at Meta is not tied to sustainability goals, according to a Meta spokesperson.
Amazon
Who: Kara Hurst, vice president and head of Worldwide Sustainability
Background and responsibilities: Hurst is responsible for executing the work of the Climate Pledge, sustainable operations and responsible supply chain management, among other things. Prior to Amazon, she was the CEO of the Sustainability Consortium, a nonprofit focused on making the consumer goods industry more sustainable. Before that, she was a vice president at BSR, a sustainable consulting firm.
Reporting structure: Hurst reports to Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon’s senior vice president of global customer fulfillment.
Compensation: Amazon does not explicitly link senior executive compensation to sustainability goals. In a 2021 proxy statement, the company explained that it does not tie cash or equity compensation to performance goals, stating, “A performance goal assumes some level of success by a prescribed measure. But to have a culture that relentlessly pursues invention and is focused on building shareholder value, not just for the current year, but five, ten, or even twenty years from now, we must encourage experimentation and long-term thinking, which, by definition, means we do not know in advance what will work. We do not want employees to focus solely on short-term returns at the expense of long-term growth and innovation.” That doesn’t mean that shareholders haven’t tried to make the company tie compensation to climate targets. They just haven’t been successful.
Netflix
Who: Emma Stewart, sustainability officer
Background and responsibilities: Stewart, who holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Management, is Netflix’s first sustainability officer and is responsible for the company’s climate and environmental strategy and execution. She oversees decarbonization efforts across Netflix’s corporate and film and TV production operations, the latter which account for the majority of the company’s direct emissions. Content and its data centers account for 55% of the company’s carbon footprint, while corporate emissions stand at 45%, according to its 2020 ESG report. (Other parts of Netflix’s Scope 3 emissions tied to energy used by its viewers dwarf these other sources.) Prior to Netflix, Stewart led World Resources Institute’s work on urban efficiency, climate and finance.
Reporting structure: Stewart reports to Netflix’s CFO Spencer Neumann.
Compensation: Stewart’s compensation is not tied to sustainability goals, according to a spokesperson, and executive pay at Netflix in general is designed to attract and retain “outstanding performers,” according to a company proxy statement.
Apple
Who: Lisa Jackson, vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives
Background and responsibilities: Jackson oversees the company’s efforts to minimize its impact on the environment “through renewable energy and energy efficiency, using greener materials, and inventing new ways to conserve precious resources,” according to Apple. She also leads its $100 million Racial Equity and Justice initiative and is responsible for Apple’s education policy programs, product accessibility work and worldwide government affairs. Prior to Apple, she was the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Reporting structure: Jackson reports to Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Compensation: Apple’s 2021 proxy statement confirmed that annual bonus payments for execs will increase or decrease by up to 10% depending on whether they meet so-called “Apple Values.” One of those values is a commitment to environmental protection.
Salesforce
Who: Suzanne DiBianca, chief impact officer and executive vice president of Corporate Relations
Background and responsibilities: DiBianca leads Salesforce’s “stakeholder capitalism strategy,” which includes the company’s sustainability efforts, ESG strategy and reporting. She’s been at Salesforce for more than 20 years and was previously the co-founder and president of the Salesforce Foundation and Salesforce.org, which provides free or discounted licenses to Salesforce software for nonprofits, educational institutions and philanthropies.
Reporting structure: DiBianca reports to Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff.
Compensation: Salesforce recently announced that a portion of executive variable pay for executive vice presidents and above will be determined by four ESG measures, which for this fiscal year will focus on equality and sustainability. The sustainability measures are tied to reducing air travel emissions, as well as increasing spend with suppliers that have signed the company’s Sustainability Exhibit, a procurement contract that aims to reduce its suppliers’ carbon emissions and align them with the 1.5-degree-Celsius target.
Intel
Who: Todd Brady, vice president of Global Public Affairs and chief sustainability officer
Background and responsibilities: The company created the CSO role within the past year. Brady sits within the manufacturing and supply chain organization of Intel. He’s an Intel lifer and has held a variety of leadership roles at the company, including environmental health and safety and product ecology and stewardship, as well as public affairs.
Reporting structure: Brady reports to Keyvan Esfarjani, the Executive Vice President and Chief Global Operations Officer at Intel.
Compensation: Since 2008, Intel has linked a portion of executive and employee compensation to corporate responsibility factors such as sustainability. In 2020, those operational goals included climate change and water stewardship. The company said it got 82% of its energy from “green” sources and reduced emissions 39% per unit that year. (That last metric is different from reducing overall emissions, though.) In 2021, the company set out new metrics, according to a spokesperson.
Humanity is falling short of its climate goals. More investment is urgently needed—especially in the next decade—to transition to a low-carbon economy. The IPCC estimates that achieving a low-carbon transition will require US$1.6-$3.8 trillion annually between 2016 and 2050 for the supply-side energy system alone. Alongside ambitious emissions reductions from their own carbon footprints, funding from businesses—including carbon credit purchases, philanthropy, and impact capital—can be catalytic in scaling investment in the climate solutions necessary to achieve a just and sustainable 1.5°C future. The impact in play is enormous. For example, natural climate solutions have the potential for capital flows greater than $100 billion annually, with opportunity across the world and especially in the Global South.
Significant momentum exists: Many organizations and initiatives are already working with funding from businesses to deploy climate solutions. The BASCS offers an opportunity to help connect and support these initiatives and the surrounding community of practice by providing a central, neutral platform for businesses and experts to meet, learn, discuss, and act together.
The work will be grounded in core principles:
Emissions Reduction: BASCS members prioritize work to reduce their own emissions in line with a science-based target (e.g., through the SBTi) and pursue high impact climate investments that go even further to curb climate change. Members will seek scalable solutions to help make hard-to-achieve reductions feasible in the future. Climate solutions funding is a complement rather than a substitute for science-based emissions reductions.
Ambition to Action: BASCS members work to catalyze and deepen investments in global emissions reductions, avoided emissions and removals across and beyond value chains (e.g., mobilizing others in the corporate sector to invest alongside us).
Measurable Impacts: BASCS members support applying sound and verified methodologies to ensure high social and environmental integrity of investments. Carbon credits claimed by companies must represent additional, real, quantifiable, and verifiable emissions reductions or removals, and must not be double counted.
Co-Benefits: BASCS members support investments that deliver environmental and social integrity and co-benefits and have strong safeguards, in addition to driving real greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Members will seek investments that quantify these co-benefits when possible.
BASCS seeks to serve and engage all organizations working to scale and improve climate solutions opportunities for business investment. To learn more and engage with the Business Alliance to Scale Climate Solutions, please visit scalingclimatesolutions.org
Founder Commentary
Amazon “As part of our commitment to The Climate Pledge, Amazon is on our way to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, which is good for the planet, people and our business. We remain focused on driving decarbonization strategies throughout our business, as well as investing in additional and quantifiable natural climate solutions to remove carbon and tackle climate change. We look forward to continuing to work across sectors with BASCS to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.” – Kara Hurst, Vice President, Worldwide Sustainability
BSR “In this Decisive Decade, we need urgent climate action to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and achieve an inclusive net zero economy. BSR is proud to serve as the secretariat for the Business Alliance to Scale Climate Solutions, advising the initiative in its effort to unlock finance for much needed climate solutions. We believe collaborations such as BASCS are key to transforming climate ambition into meaningful action and scaling impact.” – Aron Cramer, President and CEO
Disney “The Walt Disney Company is committed to protecting the planet and delivering a positive environmental legacy for future generations as we operate and grow our business. Transitioning to a low carbon economy demands fundamental changes in the way society, including the private sector, operates and innovates. Collaborating with other members of BASCS will create opportunity to scale high quality climate solutions necessary to drive a more sustainable future.” – Vijay Sudan, Executive Director, Enterprise Social Responsibility, The Walt Disney Company
EDF “The time is now for companies to take bold action on climate change. We have 10 years to dramatically reduce emissions and there is no way we can achieve a stable climate without stopping deforestation. The Business Alliance to Scale Climate Solutions can help close the climate funding gap and speed resources to protect what is most valuable. It is the kind of visionary leadership and action we need from the world’s biggest and most influential companies.” – Elizabeth Sturcken, Managing Director, EDF+Business
Google “At Google, we were the first major company to become carbon neutral in 2007 and we’ve met this commitment for over a decade. We look forward to working with the BASCS to share our learnings and accelerate our collective work to decarbonize.” – Kate Brandt, Google Sustainability Officer
Microsoft “The climate crisis is the defining challenge of our lifetimes. If we are to achieve a 1.5-degree Celsius future, we will all need to work together. Today, we are joining the Business Alliance to Scale Climate Solutions, working with other members to accelerate the maturation and scale of a range of climate solutions.” – Elizabeth Willmott, Carbon Program Manager, Microsoft.
Netflix “Netflix has committed to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2022. We will get there by reducing our internal emissions in line with climate science and by investing in the power of nature to retain and reduce emissions from the atmosphere, starting with natural ecosystems like forests above-and-below water. Scaling up the highest quality projects to “retain” and “reduce” emissions is best done collaboratively, which is why we look forward to this timely collective effort taking flight.” – Emma Stewart, Netflix Sustainability Officer
Salesforce “The time for climate action is now. Every business, government and individual must step up to the urgent challenge of climate change and to create an inclusive and sustainable future for all. At Salesforce we believe that business can be one of the greatest platforms for change. That is why we are proud to be a founding member of BASCS, an initiative to rapidly scale and improve climate solutions funding from businesses.” – Patrick Flynn, Head of Sustainability at Salesforce
UNEP “Drastically reducing deforestation and simultaneously restoring forests is the single largest nature-based opportunity for climate mitigation. UNEP is therefore proud to be a co-founder of the Business Alliance to Scale Climate Solutions, supporting the private sector’s climate ambitions for deep cuts in their own emissions – working towards high-integrity outcomes for carbon neutrality by 2050 or sooner.” – Susan Gardner, Director of the Ecosystems Division
Workday “We are committed to a 1.5 degrees Celsius science-based target, but we know there is still much more work to be done, and one of the most powerful ways we can accelerate climate action is by coming together with other organizations. This alliance is an opportunity to collaborate with others who share our vision to increase the scale and impact of climate solutions funding, so we can achieve a zero-carbon future.” – Erik Hansen, Senior Director, Environmental Sustainability, Workday
WWF “To tackle the climate crisis, we need to act immediately to drive climate emissions down. BASCS highlights that business must set science-based targets for their own emissions while bringing the investment in solutions to scale. WWF is excited to help found this clearing house for collaborative learning and support companies to make impactful investments to tackle the climate crisis.” – Marcene Mitchell, Senior Vice President for Climate Change
“Not a day passes for me without seeing the many ways in which digital technology can advance peace, human rights and sustainable development for all.”
António Guterres, Secretary-General, United Nations
The era of green tech is on the rise now, going neck and neck with an uptick of innovative digital transformation. The integration of both, however, has rarely been an option ever before. And only in recent years there has been explosive growth in attempting to combine digital technology and sustainability. That said, the main challenge of today’s business underlies in finding the balance between these two approaches.
On a large scale, every business involves digital processes in one form or another in order to meet the specific individual needs of an enterprise. Consequently, an overall digitalization provides a great opportunity for achieving sustainability goals.
What is digital sustainability?
Generally speaking, the concept is defined as a set of ecologically safe and stable factors and principles that refer to the long-term perspective for social and economic development. These initiatives are realized through a wide range of digital technology implementation.
Technically speaking, every digital business wants to make a difference so it is nowadays opting for becoming environmentally sustainable. On the other hand, a tremendous necessity to think about the future of the planet and humanity arises as far as the eye can reach. An already-changing climate, the overconsumption of nonrenewable natural resources, biodiversity losses, extensive deforestation, extreme natural disasters, massive carbon dioxide emission, poor air, and water quality are the real challenges that are impossible to face alone. Here is how sustainability can benefit a business.
How digital trends impact sustainable technology growth
For sure, all the popular tech trends like AI, ML, Internet of Things, Big Data, edge computing, robotic process automation, and others come to ease our lives. That is why average users as well as large-scale enterprises pursue these innovations and changes. For instance, artificial intelligence has been the key to complex data analysis and management aimed at sustainable decision making in such areas as climate change, air, and water security, biodiversity conservation, disaster resilience, etc.
The potential digital technology investments are estimated in billions of dollars annually, for example, experts from IDC predict that worldwide expenditure on AI systems alone is predicted to reach up to $79,2 billion by 2022.
Obviously, becoming sustainable today stands shoulder to shoulder with typical business aspects, like increasing revenues, reducing costs and providing positive customer experience.
Source: https://www.byteant.com/
Sustainable Technology: 10 steps going ahead of time
All countries are concerned about sustainable global actions and generate consistent strategies to fulfill the commitments of the Paris Agreement. The required steps should incorporate:
efficient natural resource consumption
mobilizing financial sources
the shift from fossil fuel toward perpetual energy
climate change risk mitigation
supply chain improvement
across-industry transformation, including IT
keeping the balance between the urban and rural economy
taking nature-oriented solutions
vulnerable groups and areas protection
minimizing emission and pollution levels
Presumably, the stakeholders of top worldwide companies feel their responsibility to provide and thus leverage from sustainable digital technology so ahead-of-time enterprises have already taken steps towards becoming clean and green.
5 great examples of sustainable technology implementation
Let’s have a closer look at some sustainable transformation examples and companies that successfully reap from clean technology.
Walmart, one of the biggest retail corporations represents multiple deployments of digital transformations that work to eliminate wastage and energy usage and to provide supply chain control. First of all, numerous built-in IoT sensors and shelf-scanning robots prove to be sustainable in terms of energy savings and customer experience. Also, Walmart is a successful e-retailer that provides efficient online services, like Mobile Express Returns and QR code scanning. It enables their customers to shop staying at home thus diminishes transport usage and CO2 emissions.Walmart is constantly developing innovative ideas that can be implemented not only within the retail branch. In 2018 the corporation patented the idea of a robobee – a self-manned drone for pollinating crops equipped with cameras and sensors. This tool also makes it possible to detect agricultural problems and get more sufficient control over the Walmart food supply chain that, consequently, minimizes food waste.
Patagonia is a sustainable clothing company with $800 million revenue that can boast with using organic materials, selling worn and recrafted outfits and organic provision. Also, the company provides worldwide fundraising through online banking and keeps an online blog The Cleanest Line where articles are dedicated to environmental crises and solutions. Being sustainably conscious, Patagonia has implemented a number of innovations in company management, such asrecycled construction materials with laminated coated windows that prevent overheating
solar panels with photosensors and motion detectors
LED lighting, new systems of heating, ventilation and air conditioning controlled by a smart grid
Moreover, the company has got an AI central workstation that automatically controls all operational systems from an indoor environment to outdoor irrigation. Bathrooms and toilets are equipped with water control sensors. Even the landscape and plants around the buildings are chosen and designed to diminish water usage. Workers are encouraged to use electric cars and get financial compensation for coming to work by bike or public transport.
Mega City of NEOM definitely deserves the name of a sustainability dream where all possible and impossible technologies merge to serve humanity. NEOM represents how far one can go with incredible imagination and substantial finance. The mindset of building a sustainable megacity was born in Saudi Arabia which is ready to invest $500 billion into digital innovations run with the help of renewable energy instead of fossil fuels.NEOM is positioned as a future home city and workplace for more than a million inhabitants from all over the world. The implementation of ambiguous digital transformations, like IoT and AL software, is to control environmental conditions within the megacity. For example, saving water, especially in limited desert surroundings, becomes accessible due to smart sensors for water management and rainwater collection. Moreover, in NEOM the average temperature is expected to be lower and the wind speed adapted if necessary. The project’s first results are expected in several years looming at the 2030 horizon.
Microsoft as one of the leading software providers moves towards reducing its environmental impact and at the same time helps other companies turn “green”. Noteworthy, Microsoft’s cloud computing has already empowered energy efficiency and material waste reduction. The increased accessibility of serverless and open-source software minimizes cooling processes, ventilation, and air conditioning in fewer data centers. Adding power management function to Microsoft products enabled smart energy consumption on end devices, like monitors and hard drives.Explore how Microsoft uses artificial intelligence to create a complete directory of US forests. As a result, we can better manage them for a sustainable future.
To achieve global sustainability goals, sustainability technology companies of all sizes should work cooperatively, like Microsoft and Ørsted. The latter is a well-known wind technology and bioenergy provider from Denmark. Their decision to unite enables both sides to successfully meet environmental challenges. Ørsted’s greatest striving is to build “an entirely green world” with a 100 % carbon-free energy supplement by 2025. The company is diminishing oil- and coal-based activity in favor of clean energy systems. Ørsted owns more than a thousand offshore wind turbines equipped with sensors that seamlessly generate valuable data. Microsoft advanced predictive analytics and AI technology is part of Ørsted’s digital strategy of sustainable data transformation for saving time and resources. In 2020, Ørsted was ranked as the most sustainable company in the world.
What’s next
There is hardly an organization that doesn’t realize the necessity of a sustainability approach. The worldwide decision-making entities, such as the World Health Organization or the UN, are deeply concerned about ecological problems and social inequality more than ever before. Immediate measures have to be made for global financial inclusion and political involvement. The price is high but is worth paying when human well-being is at stake.
