Climate Week NYC was just underway on the sidelines of UNGA, and Salesforce made waves.
In a bid to emphasize enterprise accountability, Salesforce dropped a Sustainability Cloud to deliver trusted, investor-grade insights on environmental impact.
The announcement left tremors in its wake. And why shouldn’t it?
An impending climate and energy crisis hangs over both consumers and industries, with effects compounded in more deprived parts of the world. Activists, as well as investors, are calling on the corporate world to clean house and adhere to ethical energy consumption practices.
So for this issue, we jump right in to look at what keeps business from contributing and circle back to what the Sustainability Cloud puts up.
Key Highlights: Trust and Auditability take center stage
Investor-Grade Data
The cloud is set to be accessible from December 2019 onwards. Its arrival would empower smaller sustainability teams to gather and audit C-suite worthy environmental data for faster decision making.
Single Platform: Potential industry standard
This would undoubtedly be a shift from massive, unusable spreadsheets of emissions and energy data. Salesforce figured that industries might find footprint accounting convenient if the instruments came from a recognized or potential industry standard.
Auditability and Upscaling
The familiar Salesforce interface of the tool bodes well for companies looking to meet meeting its sustainability goals. It empowers businesses to drive climate action and carbon accountability programs at scale.
Per requirement, the tool works with internal and third-party data. It also comes with extrapolation and validation capabilities. These are meant to help with audits in smaller firms that have lesser data to work with, and unreliable utility billing.
360 degree View: Empowerment for under-resourced teams to make their case
Real-time visualizations and dashboard views can dramatically speed up deliverables and metrics that drive executive decisions.
Put through in-house trials; wrinkles ironed out
Salesforce even deployed the cloud internally to evaluate its sustainability efforts led by Patrick Flynn, Vice President of Sustainability.
In his words, the product measured their footprint across all aspects of operations like data centers, public cloud, real estate. Further, he mentioned their work with third-party providers to have them make operations cleaner, and more powered by renewable energy and less carbon-intense.
Groundwork put in for Net-zero
Goal setting: The Step Up Declaration of GCAS
Previously, at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, Salesforce indicated tabled the Step Up Declaration and related involvements to bring about a climate reversal by 2020.
It also committed to upholding 1.5°C science-based emissions reduction targets aligned with a net-zero future.
Solidarity with the climate cause
Salesforce, led by its employee affinity group, encouraged employees in Australia and New Zealand to show up for their local Climate March on September 20.
It also leads by example knowing that operating as a net-zero company fixes an intrinsic cost on emissions.
Homestretch
On account of urgency, Salesforce accelerated its timeline to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions before time. For this, it effected that
- Only carbon-neutral products are delivered
- All employee commuting and business travel gets offset
- Operations move over to renewable energy.
Investor wariness weighs in – ESG becomes the face of an aggressive shift
Significantly, while climate change emerges as biggest shift in the competitive landscape, investors are sitting up to take notice. Just this year, CEOs cited climate change as the top risk to their organization’s growth.
In all of this, ESG, (an investment strategy that considers environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors in portfolio selection) has begun to feature in investment decisions.
Everything rests on sustainability. Without it, there’s no business, or even meaning to it. Companies need to pick up on these signals to prevent falling behind.
Investor communities and B2B collaborators are asking about sustainability programs, and the Sustainability Cloud could go a long way to address those concerns.
Towards a low carbon economy
For one thing, settling to a low carbon footprint requires collaboration and technological advancements to support compliance.
This could, at last, spell radical changes in decision making and create newer prospects like cloud solutions that encompass all footprint reduction arrangements. At the same time, it could drive third-party data sharing to inform regulations and audits around clean energy, green spaces, data centers, and virtual power purchases.
That said, don’t get ahead of yourself just yet. The dynamics of climate change are notoriously complex and carry too many variables (even though they follow larger trends).
Ultimately, this only works if companies are willing to rethink or scale back processes identified as carbon intense. There’re only so many carbon credits to go around.
