Accelerating sustainability progress by growing ESG capabilities

By Ola Williams, Country Manager, Microsoft Nigeria

Companies are under increasing pressure globally to accelerate their progress towards sustainability targets by focusing on a growing set of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) capabilities for their businesses. In recent years an increasing number of companies have come to appreciate the importance of ESG for their businesses, and have moved towards adopting ESG goals, incorporating targets such as net zero emissions, being water positive and zero waste, and other long-term sustainability goals.

There is also sound business sense behind the move towards sustainable business practices. Sustainability reduces costs and can affect operating profits by up to 60%, according to McKinsey & Company.

To build more quickly toward a global net-zero carbon economy, organizations of all types, sizes and sectors are facing the need to transform common practices. This includes more effectively managing their environmental footprint, embedding sustainability through their organizations and value chains, and making strategic business investments that drive value. This is no small undertaking – and it starts with solving a data problem.

We can’t just talk about ESG – we must measure it

To progress their sustainability agendas, organizations need to not only set sustainability targets but track them as well. You can’t progress what you can’t measure. The challenge, however, is that many businesses lack the timely, accurate access to the information they need to monitor their sustainability efforts, with fragmented data sitting in siloes across the organization. It can be difficult to unify and consolidate this information into one sustainability scorecard or keep track of progress against their goals year on year.

Organizations need more accessible, centralized data intelligence to make the decisions that are required to address these complex issues, weighing both business and ESG criteria to direct capital toward investment opportunities that balance growth and impact.

A report by PWC notes that cloud-based data management and reporting can help support ESG by automating processes and standardizing the data, providing increased transparency within the organization as leaders seek to better understand diverse social and environmental risks. Integrated data solutions enable organizations to examine and manage the footprints of their facilities, fleets, and production processes and shift the activities of their people to be responsive to the changing requirements of a sustainable economy.

Although it’s important to identify opportunities to reduce energy consumption and emissions, it’s also critical to adopt integrated systems to facilitate the transition to clean energy. As Microsoft itself has found, for most organizations, this won’t be a straight path: it will require some degree of flexibility as markets and energy infrastructures beyond their

control change. But intelligent tools can help organizations predict and adapt to changes while continuing to accelerate progress.

For CIOs, tracking emissions starts ‘at home’

As organizations work towards net zero carbon emissions, Deloitte opines that organizations must adopt cleaner and greener hyperscale data centers and replace fossil fuels-based grid energy with renewable resources. Similarly, Accenture stated that migrations to the public cloud can reduce CO² emissions by 59 million tons per year, which equates to taking 22 million cars off the road.

For organizations who are working towards net zero goals, eliminating emissions from their own IT operations is a significant part of this journey. How CIOs deploy and configure their IT tools can affect the environmental footprint of their own systems. One of the key challenges is ensuring that organizations gain the transparency and insights they need to manage their environmental footprint, and embed sustainability initiatives throughout the organization and value chain to create new value.

Moving to the cloud is an important part of the sustainability journey for CIOs. On-premise datacenters are resource-intensive, and one way organizations can reduce their environmental impact and increase business value is when they replace tools, systems or activities with more efficient options. Moving workloads to the cloud, for example, can cloud can have a dramatic impact on an organization’s carbon footprint, increasing both carbon and energy efficiencies, and

help companies reach emission reduction targets. In fact, transitioning workloads to Microsoft Azure can produce up to 98 percent more carbon efficiency and up to 93 percent more energy efficiency than on-premises options.

Unifying data intelligence

To effectively drive sustainability reporting, sustainability efforts, and business transformation, organizations need better visibility into activities across their enterprise and value chain.

Unifying data intelligence is crucial to drive sustainability reporting and efforts. Most companies have a blend of data ingestion methods, from manual import or file imports to connections to disparate data sources. Ideally, this needs to be collated and converted into a common format that enables converting raw data into calculated emissions, creating a visualization of the organization’s environmental impact, highlighting which areas need more attention, and where progress is being made.

Sustainability is at the core of our business, and it has been for more than a decade – extending from optimizing our own operations to building a community of customers and partners learning and working together to advance their sustainability ambitions. Through collaboration, the delivery of dedicated sustainability solutions, and investments in climate equity and innovation, we are committed to leading and driving transformation to build the world every person and organization on the planet needs to thrive. In doing so, we focus on unifying data intelligence.

Building a sustainable IT infrastructure

Especially for a company like Microsoft, with our focus on helping the world’s organizations innovate through technology, our climate-related role could not be clearer. Cloud-based digital services, the better use of data, and rapid advances in AI will create new opportunities for us to help every organization achieve more progress in addressing the world’s climate and energy needs. This includes going beyond capturing data to helping customers aggregate sustainability data in an actionable way.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability empowers organizations to accelerate sustainability progress by bringing together a growing set of Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) capabilities from across Microsoft Cloud portfolio plus solutions from our global ecosystem of partners.

Together, we’re enabling organizations to gain the transparency and insights they need to manage their environmental footprint, embed sustainability through their organization and value chain, and create new value in a changing landscape.

Ola Williams, Country Manager, Microsoft Nigeria