Government, business, and community leaders worldwide have staked out ambitious goals to mitigate the impacts of climate change. But limiting global warming requires harnessing digital transformation tools to speed up sustainability efforts at scale — and ensure the transparency, accountability, and accuracy of climate-related targets.
The ways in which enterprise software companies operationalize sustainability practices and help organizations set and achieve their climate action goals are at the heart of a new report, “BSA’s Global Sustainability Principles,” issued this month by BSA | The Software Alliance.
What’s going on?
As seen most recently during COP27, countering the impacts of climate change remains as urgent of a challenge as ever. “The world still needs a giant leap on climate ambition,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in November, as business leaders announced historic climate action commitments.
What the enterprise software industry is doing
As BSA’s new report makes clear, achieving these goals requires not only political and economic support at all levels — it also requires deploying innovative technologies that enable the design, measuring, and tracking of ambitious and science-based solutions to tackle the challenges of climate change.
While these solutions will vary depending on specific communities and companies, BSA and our members have developed a set of Global Sustainability Principles outlining how the enterprise software industry is working to advance sustainability efforts and climate resilience. Those principles include:
- Setting ambitious, transparent, and accountable climate targets;
- Advocating for policies to create a more resilient and inclusive society; and
- Harnessing the power of digital transformation to improve sustainability.
There are already terrific, practical examples available that showcase how enterprise software companies enable greater sustainability.
Setting and Tracking Progress: As the report makes clear, BSA members are setting and meeting their own goals and helping other businesses, governments, and organizations track their progress.
- Salesforce, in 2021, achieved net-zero residual emissions across its full value chain and achieved 100 percent renewable energy for its operations.
- Workday has provided its customers with a carbon-neutral cloud since 2017. In 2020, the company reached its goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions across its offices, data centers, and business travel a year earlier than expected.
- IBM requires all first-tier suppliers to maintain their own environmental management system, set goals on energy management on GHG emissions reduction and waste management, and publicly disclose progress.
- Atlassian achieved its goal of running operations on 100 percent renewable electricity in 2022 and is working to achieve net-zero emissions by no later than 2040.
- Cisco is one of the first tech companies to have its goal of achieving net-zero across its value chain by 2040 validated by the SBTi Net-Zero standard, the world’s first framework for corporate climate target-setting.
Promoting a Resilient and Inclusive Society: BSA members are providing their software and expertise to empower their workforces and stakeholders to champion sustainability.
- The Microsoft Sustainability Connected Community empowers 5,000 company employees across 32 regional chapters to make sustainability a part of their job and help Microsoft become carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste by 2030.
- SAP’s Sustainability Champions Network engages over 300 champions from various fields and SAP locations worldwide to raise awareness of sustainability practices.
- Okta provides economic opportunities for historically excluded communities through renewable energy certificates (RECs) with a social benefit, such as education and community-based solar power in low-income communities.
- Zendesk partners with the Ecosystem Restoration Camps to support the global group’s mission to fight poverty, climate change, species extinction, and desertification by restoring degrading landscapes all over the world.
Harnessing Digital Transformation: We cannot build a more sustainable future without harnessing digital transformation tools to help governments, companies, and organizations achieve their targets and implement sustainable practices.
- Autodesk fitted the Afsluitdijk dam in the Netherlands with sensors during a restoration project that resulted in an 80 percent reduction in design coordination time and a 40,000-ton reduction in CO2 emissions.
- Oracle’s automated transport planning software helped Unilever reduce the number of its trucks required for delivery, cut carbon outputs, and shrink inventory requirements.
- Bentley Systems implemented its hydraulic modeling software to optimize pumps for Evides NV. This helped the Dutch company reduce energy costs by 33 percent and its carbon footprint by 942 tons of CO2 per year while delivering reliable and safe drinking water to its 2.5 million customers.
What’s ahead
As BSA’s report and the many real-world examples within it highlight, data technologies and digital transformation tools can bolster sustainability efforts for both governments and the private sector. Governments can help support continued digital transformation through the types of forward-looking policies supported by BSA, while digital transformation in turn will help companies and communities meet ever-more ambitious sustainability goals.
Read our new paper, BSA’s Global Sustainability Principles, at www.bsa.org.
