Friday 17 January 2020

Microsoft pledges to become ‘carbon negative’ by 2030

Microsoft has pledged to ensure all its operations are “carbon negative” by 2030.

The tech giant aims to reduce, rather than just offset the carbon it emits into the atmosphere and by 2050, it wants to remove “all the carbon” the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975.

Microsoft plans to move to 100% renewable electricity by 2025 across its data centres, buildings and campuses through power purchase agreements (PPAs) as well as electrify its global campus operations vehicle fleet by 2030.

It is also launching a $1 billion (£0.76bn) climate innovation fund to accelerate the global development of carbon reduction, capture and removal technologies as well as an initiative to enable its suppliers and customers to use its technology to reduce their carbon footprint.

In addition, the company intends to make carbon reduction an “explicit aspect” of its procurement processes for its supply chain, with the progress on all of these fronts published in an annual Environmental Sustainability Report.

Brad Smith, President of Microsoft said: “While we at Microsoft have worked hard to be ‘carbon neutral’ since 2012, our recent work has led us to conclude that this is an area where we’re far better served by humility than pride. And we believe this is true not only for ourselves but for every business and organisation on the planet.

“Like most carbon neutral companies, Microsoft has achieved carbon neutrality primarily by investing in offsets that primarily avoid emissions instead of removing carbon that has already been emitted. That’s why we’re shifting our focus. In short, neutral is not enough to address the world’s needs.

“While it is imperative that we continue to avoid emissions and these investments remain important, we see an acute need to begin removing carbon from the atmosphere, which we believe we can help catalyse through our investments.”