Microsoft's Global Sustainability Goals
Microsoft's Global Sustainability Goals
Microsoft's Global Sustainability Goals
@Blockchainboss18 hours ago
How can we advance sustainability?
2024 Environmental Sustainability Report
- Reducing our Scope 3, or indirect, emissions.
- Reducing water use and replenishing more water than we consume in our datacenter operations.
- Reducing our direct operational emissions (Scope 1 and 2).
- Accelerating carbon removal.
- Designing for circularity to minimize waste and reusing cloud hardware.
- Improving biodiversity and protecting more land than we use.
- 1 Improving measurement by harnessing the power of digital technology to garner better insight and action.
- 2 Increasing efficiency by applying datacenter innovations that improve efficiency as quickly as possible.
- 3 Forging partnerships to accelerate technology breakthroughs through our investments and AI capabilities, including for greener steel, concrete, and fuels.
- 4 Building markets by using our purchasing power t o accelerate market demand for these types of breakthroughs.
- 5 Advocating for public policy changes that will accelerate climate advances.
- 1 We are taking action to reduce the intensity with which we withdraw resources by continuing to design and innovate in order to minimize water use and achieve our intensity target.
- 2 Our new datacenters are designed and optimized to support AI workloads and will consume zero water for cooling. This initiative aims to further reduce our global reliance on freshwater resources as AI compute demands increase.
- 3 We are partnering to advance water policy . In 2023, we joined the Coalition for Water Recycling. Over the coming year we will finalize a position and strategy for water policy.
- 4 We are developing innovative scalable replenishment projects in high water stress locations where we operate datacenters. We recently announced Water United, a new initiative to unite public and private sectors in reducing water loss from leakage across the Colorado River Basin.
In this report
Overview
Foreword
04
2023 highlights
07
How we work
08
Cover captured by: Finnian Power Regional CE Program Manager, Ireland
Microsoft sustainability
Carbon
Waste
Our approach
10
Improving the measurement and efficiency of our operations
Building markets and driving progress
Learnings and what's next
14
18
22
Water
Ecosystems
5M
metric tons of carbon removal contracted in FY23
18.5K
metric tons of waste diverted from landfills and incinerators
Our approach
35
Reducing waste at our campuses and datacenters
Advancing circular cloud hardware and packaging
Improving device and packaging circularity
Learnings and what's next
37
40
42
45
Customer sustainability
61M
cubic meters of water replenishment projects contracted by end of FY23
Global sustainability
$761M
allocated towards climate technologies through our Climate Innovation Fund (CIF) 1
Appendix
Appendix A
85
Appendix B
86
#sustainabilitychampions
87
Reporting disclosure
A key principle of our work is transparency. This report, published annually, includes our strategy, progress against our goals, and key challenges and trends we see in this work. We also publish our environmental data, which is included in the separate Environmental Data Fact Sheet. Deloitte & Touche LLP performed a review relating to specified information within Section 1 of the Environmental Data Fact Sheet.
Read about how we report in Appendix A.
Customer sustainability
Appendix
Overview
Reviewing our 2023 progress and learnings
Our employees are at the core of our sustainability journey. Their passion and commitment catalyzes progress in every part of our business and their communities around the world.
Images taken by employees are featured throughout the 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report.
Foreword
Accelerating innovation and partnership for people and the planet
Four years ago, Microsoft committed that by 2030 we would become carbon negative, water positive, zero waste, and protect more land than we use. Since that announcement, we have seen major changes both in the technology sector and in our understanding of what it will take to meet our climate goals. New technologies, including generative AI, hold promise for new innovations that can help address the climate crisis. At the same time, the infrastructure and electricity needed for these technologies create new challenges for meeting sustainability commitments across the tech sector. As we take stock as a company in 2024, we remain resolute in our commitment to meet our climate goals and to empower others with the technology needed to build a more sustainable future.
At the same time, there are two areas where we're not yet on track, and in each of these we are intensively engaged in work to identify and pursue additional breakthroughs. These are:
Even amid the challenges, we remain optimistic. We're encouraged by ongoing progress across our campuses and datacenters, and throughout our value chain. Even more, we're inspired by the scores of executives and employees across Microsoft who are rolling up their sleeves and identifying new and innovative steps that are helping us to close critical gaps. We all recognize the same thing: there is no issue today that connects everyone on the planet more than the issues around climate change. We all need to succeed together.
Carbon negative
Our carbon negative commitment includes three primary areas: reducing carbon emissions, increasing use of carbon-free electricity, and carbon removal. We made meaningful progress on carbon-free electricity and carbon removal in FY23. Microsoft has taken a first-mover approach to supporting carbon-free electricity infrastructure, making long-term investments to bring more carbonfree electricity onto the grids where we operate.
' There is no issue today that connects everyone on the planet more than the issues around climate change.'
At the end of last year, the world met in Dubai at COP28 to assess global sustainability progress. The results were sobering. The world is not on track to meet critical climate goals, and we see many of the world's challenges reflected in our own situation. During the past four years, we have overcome multiple bottlenecks and have accelerated progress in meaningful ways. As we report here, we are on track in several areas. But not in every area. We therefore are mobilizing to accelerate progress in areas where we're not yet on track.
In four areas we are on track, and in each of these we see progress that has the potential to have global impact beyond our own sustainability work. These are:
Foreword continued
In 2023, we increased our contracted portfolio of renewable energy assets to more than 19.8 gigawatts (GW), including projects in 21 countries. In FY23, we also contracted 5,015,019 metric tons of carbon removal to be retired over the next 15 years. We are continuing to build a portfolio of projects, balanced across low, medium, and high durability solutions.
Carbon reduction continues to be an area of focus, especially as we work to address Scope 3 emissions. In 2023, we saw our Scope 1 and 2 emissions decrease by 6.3% from our 2020 baseline. This area remains on track to meet our goals. But our indirect emissions (Scope 3) increased by 30.9%. In aggregate, across all Scopes 1-3, Microsoft's emissions are up 29.1% from the 2020 baseline.
The rise in our Scope 3 emissions primarily comes from the construction of more datacenters and the associated embodied carbon in building materials, as well as hardware components such as semiconductors, servers, and racks. Our challenges are in part unique to our position as a leading cloud supplier that is expanding its datacenters. But even more, we reflect the challenges the world must overcome to develop and use greener concrete, steel, fuels, and chips. These are the biggest drivers of our Scope 3 challenges.
We have launched a company-wide initiative to identify and develop the added measures we'll need to reduce our Scope 3 emissions.
Leaders in every area of the company have stepped up to sponsor and drive this work. This led to the development of more than 80 discrete and significant measures that will help us reduce these emissionsincluding a new requirement for select scale, highvolume suppliers to use 100% carbon-free electricity for Microsoft delivered goods and services by 2030. As a whole, this work builds on our multi-prong strategy, this year focusing on the following:
Water positive
We take a holistic approach to becoming water positive, which includes water access , replenishment, innovation, reduction, and policy. In 2023, we achieved our water access target by providing more than 1.5 million people with access to clean water and sanitation solutions. We contracted water replenishment projects estimated to provide more than 25 million m 3 in volumetric water benefit over the lifetime of these projects-enough water to fill about 10,000 Olympic sized swimming pools. Finally, we continue to drive innovation in water , through first-of-their kind replenishment projects like FIDO, which leverages AI-enabled acoustic analysis to reduce water loss from leakage.
Looking ahead, as our datacenter business continues to grow, so does the need to minimize our water consumption and replenish more than we consume in these operations. In FY23 our progress on water accelerated, and we know we need to implement an even stronger plan to accelerate it further. We therefore are investing in our water positive commitment in four ways:
Zero waste
Our journey to zero waste includes reducing waste at our campuses and datacenters, advancing circular cloud hardware and packaging, and improving device and packaging circularity. In FY23, we achieved a reuse and recycle rate of 89.4% for servers and components across all cloud hardware, a target that is increasingly important as needs for cloud services continue to grow. In 2023, we also diverted more than 18,537 metric tons of waste from landfills or incinerators across our owned datacenters and campuses, and we reduced single-use plastics in our Microsoft product packaging to 2.7%.