April 20, 2022

#BuildFor2030: Accelerating solutions for a sustainable future

The Microsoft #BuildFor2030 Initiative and Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is a heavy investment in climate action that aligns our ecosystem around sustainability goals and customer needs. We’re already finding that partners are building new solutions to help customers and industries across the globe transition to a net-zero carbon future. This has helped enable us to align our ecosystem around these tightly related sustainability goals and customer needs.

Recognizing our sustainable partners

To celebrate Earth Day 2022, I’m excited to shine focus on Microsoft partners making a positive impact through the initiative. I’m proud of the way they’re building for a more sustainable future and how their innovative solutions are delivering impact to the business community while making the world a better place. Here is a brief list of a few partners deserving extra recognition:

Earth Knowledge: The Earth Knowledge Foresight Platform is a solution that brings full clarity to the economic risk of climate change and biodiversity loss and your associated investment decisions. Unique climate and biodiversity indicators simplify how institutions assess risk and identify opportunities at the physical asset level for the companies in which they invest.

ICONICS: ICONICS solutions provide insight to ensure that all treatment and filtration happens as planned. Its key capabilities include native GIS mapping, mobile visualization, and real-time, distributed alarming. Customer benefits include energy and labor savings, leak detection, pollution reduction, government compliance, and sustainability improvement.

Uptake: By leveraging Uptake industrial AI software and solutions, companies can achieve transparency from sensor to boardroom. Uptake helps customers get more out of their digital investments to record, report, and reduce environmental impact while creating synergies across sustainability, ESG, energy innovation, and more.

Honeywell: Honeywell Forge Predictive Maintenance is a SaaS solution which continuously analyzes asset performance to identify issues before failures occur. It provides building owners and operators with guided real time performance insights and centralized expertise across their portfolio.

Discover more #BuildFor2030 partner solutions focused on sustainability. We’re proud to support Microsoft partners enabling solutions for a more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable world.

Sustainability goals: from here to 2030

Organizations across industries are embracing the importance of sustainability, which says to me the appetite for these solutions is there. According to a Forrester report, the number of firms committing to The Climate Pledge around Carbon, Waste and Water will triple this year. A short list of Microsoft’s commitments to combat the climate crisis are:

Carbon

By 2030, be carbon negative.
By 2025, shift to 100 percent supply of renewable energy.
By 2030, 100 percent of Microsoft energy supply, 100 percent of the time, will come from carbon free resources (100/100/0).
By 2030, reduce third-party emissions (which represent more than 97 percent of our total emissions) by more than half.
By 2030, eliminate our dependency on diesel fuel in our datacenters.
By 2030, electrify our global campus operations vehicle fleet.
Deploy $1 billion of our own capital in a Climate Innovation Fund.
By 2025, protect more land than we use.
Build, deploy, and accelerate a Planetary Computer through our AI for Earth program.

Waste

By 2025, achieve 90 percent reuse of servers and components.
By 2025, eliminate single-use plastics in packaging.
By 2030, achieve 100 percent recyclable Microsoft product packaging.
By 2030, achieve 100 percent recyclable Surfacedevices and Xbox consoles and accessories.
By 2030, divert at least 75 percent of construction and deconstruction waste for all projects from landfill and incineration.
By 2030, divert at least 90 percent of solid waste from landfills and incinerators for our campuses and owned datacenters.

Water

By 2030, become water positive in our direct operations, meaning we will replenish more water than we use.
By 2030, ensure accessibility to clean drinking and sanitation water to more than 1.5 million people.

Check out our recently released Microsoft 2021 Environmental Sustainability Report for a deeper look at our commitments and progress.

Thinking big: our #BuildFor2030 focus

The #Buildfor2030 Initiative provides a roadmap to help partners apply skills and expertise to bring impact-focused solutions to market across areas aligned to five of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Their challenges are aligned around five #Buildfor2030 themes to create transformative solutions to global challenges. These are:

Gender equality: Enable technology that creates equal participation, equitable economic access, and opportunities at all levels in work and life for women and girls.
Climate action and sustainability: Build new solutions to help customers and industries across the globe transition to a net-zero carbon future.
Digital inclusion and accessibility: Create accessible technology devices and applications with inclusive design for more than 1 billion people living with disabilities
Enabling the nonprofit sector: Develop solutions to enable the nonprofit sector to achieve scalable and measurable mission impact.
Empowering communities: Reimagine solutions that strengthen our institutions, build resilient infrastructure, and create equitable access to health, education and social services.

How can you get involved?

In a recent blog post, we focused on seven best practices for sustainability that we are using to set strategy and accountability, and measure progress drawn from the Sustainability Report.

Set ambitions based on the science
Scale strategy by using the “whole of the business”
Set the tone from the top
Make commitments relevant to business groups
Hold everyone accountable
Take steps to accelerate markets, ecosystems, and global progress
Report on everything, not just progress

For those who are trying to align with ecosystem goals, the climate action & sustainability goal an important way to align themselves with Microsoft to help the planet and empower a more sustainable ecosystem.

What do we mean? Learn more.

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Building a sustainability solution

Together, we can accelerate solutions that are good for the planet and good for business. Discover how you can bring sustainability into your business.

Nominate Yourself

We know there’s room for growth from within Microsoft, as well as partners and consumes ready to make a difference. If you’re a partner going above and beyond, nominate your solution or service to be featured with added go-to-market benefits.