Technology is a force for good when it comes to sustainability

Name:

Aisling Curtis

What is your current role and a little about your background?

I’m Strategy and Sustainability Director for Microsoft Ireland. I’ve worked for Microsoft since 2016 in various leadership positions including leading Commercial, Technical and Strategic teams. Prior to this I worked in Telecommunications living internationally and doing global and regional roles. I’m passionate about enabling our customers and partners transform and equip their organisations for the future.

What is Microsoft’s approach to Sustainability?

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more. Everything we do is driven by this deep sense of purpose and the timeless values of trust, privacy, inclusion, and transparency. We recognise that we have both an enormous opportunity and responsibility to ensure that the technology we create benefits everyone on the planet, as well as the planet itself.

As such our targets are ambitious. By 2030, our commitment is to be carbon negative and by 2050 our goal is to remove the historical emissions omitted since we were founded in 1975. Further to this, we are committing to being water positive and having zero waste operations by 2030. To meet our commitments, we’re improving efficiencies and delivering technology to help our customers measure and manage their carbon emissions more effectively. We’re also breaking new ground with carbon removal purchases and investments to help develop the carbon reduction market.

However, the challenges facing people and the planet are complex, and no one company, sector, or even country can solve them alone. In fact, it is clearly evident that there are different sustainability focus areas across different industries and that different methodologies are required to make a step change in relation to sustainability ambitions. That’s why Microsoft is committed to working across sectors to foster partnerships and solutions that will result in positive impacts on our environment. We are supporting business leaders to increasingly connect how they approach their digital and sustainability transformation programmes and embed both coherent strategies and roadmaps to achieve their overarching long-term objectives, using technology as a force for good.

How are you tracking currently against your targets?

Microsoft published its first annual sustainability report this year, tracking our progress across 2021 which was a year of both successes and challenges. While we continued to make progress on several of our goals, with an overall reduction in Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, our Scope 3 emissions increased year over year. These emissions are the result of activities from assets not owned or controlled by Microsoft, but that the indirectly impacts our value chain.

We know that scope three emissions are the hardest to control. As such, we have adapted the way we set our carbon targets and increased the frequency and scope of our internal reporting, which will bring greater transparency and ability for informed decision making across the company. This is evident in our updated Supplier Code of Conduct, where we require in-scope suppliers to report their emissions. We now have data from more than 87% of these suppliers with the majority included in our carbon accounting reporting.

What is the biggest challenge your company faces in relation to achieving those targets?

Protecting our planet and reducing the environmental impact of how our economies and societies operate is a seismic challenge for all organisations, and Microsoft is no different. One of the key challenges is that progress isn’t always linear, and this can be difficult for business planning. The rate at which we can implement emission reductions is dependent on many factors that can fluctuate over time, ranging from our own business growth and supplier mix to the rate of growth of green infrastructure, such as the supply of and transition speed to renewable energy. Another key challenge for organisations is reporting. There needs to be consistent, robust and interoperable GHG reporting metrics that promote flexibility of disclosure requirements and recognition of the role new technologies will play in tracking and calculations.

What initiatives have you introduced to date, and which is having the greatest impact on your sustainability goals?

Last year, we made the world’s largest purchase of carbon removal at 1.4 million metric tons, and this fiscal year we are on track to exceed that by procuring 1.5 million metric tons. Looking ahead, we will set even bolder carbon removal targets, and we will continue to increase our contracted volume year over year through 2030. This has an added impact of helping drive greater market maturation in carbon removal – an advance sorely needed.

Additionally, over the last two years, within Microsoft, we have been focused on an exciting new biodiversity initiative to put data and digital technology to work, including through an ambitious program to aggregate environmental data from around the world and embed it within new “Planetary Computer.” We will combine this with new work to help partners and customers to use the resulting output to enhance environmental decision-making in their organisational activities.

However, we believe the biggest impact we can make is by supporting the sustainable transformation journey’s of our customers. We are working at the forefront of this sustainable transformation alongside innovative Irish organisations within all sectors. For example, through integrating technology across many manual, outdated processes, we have supported Ulster University on a digital transformation journey that is not only reducing administration time and increasing student engagement, but developing processes across digital platforms that will ultimately streamline and reduce consumption across many areas of the campus.

What is Microsoft doing to enable their customers to be ready for a Sustainable future?

We are investing in product development to help our customers and our partners better manage their own emissions and begin to identify steps toward meaningful change. Last year, we announced the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, to provide comprehensive, integrated, and automated sustainability management for organizations at any stage of the sustainability journey. As a leading technology provider of sustainable solutions, Microsoft is supporting our customers and partners as they move toward a net zero, environmentally sustainable future.

How important is sustainability to your employees and how is it impacting your ability to attract talent?

Technology can and should be a force for good, which is why at Microsoft, we aspire for meaningful innovation rather than innovation for innovation’s sake. There is a lot of opportunity for our employees to work with businesses on their sustainable transformation journey’s. That opportunity to do real-purpose driven work that will bring societal benefits is hugely attractive to our existing employees and to potential employees. Additionally, our reputation as an organisation genuinely committed to reducing the impact of our organisation on the planet is also hugely important to employees.

Aisling will be speaking at the ESG Summit on Thursday 13th October in Croke Park, Dublin. For more details visit www.esgsummit.ie