(Credit: EY)EY and Microsoft are addressing sustainability needs through the development of ESG data management offerings that help clients achieve decarbonization and net-zero goals in their operations. This includes improving carbon tracking and reporting, facilitating value chain traceability of carbon, and developing enterprise carbon management solutions that support carbon capture businesses.
To address the growing set of challenges that organizations face, EY and Microsoft are seeking to strengthen their platforms and solutions on which they collaborate. The portfolio of offerings provides enterprise-ready services and solutions across the sustainability life cycle, designed to help clients address planning and roll-out of decarbonization and end-to-end ESG strategies.
With a focus on decarbonization through solutions such as the EY Decarbonization Management Platform, clients should be able to more clearly understand their current carbon intensity and manage, monitor and report against it. They gain full visibility of carbon footprints to make sound future decisions and prioritize and monitor the right intervention pathways and investments for their business.
The suite of offerings facilitates emissions and offsets data capture, accounting, scenario modeling, risk assessment and external disclosures across asset portfolios and investments. This results in a lower risk transition that will accelerate clients’ sustainability journeys, helping them to model ESG strategies and support planning, management and roll-out of end-to-end decarbonization.
Recognizing the complexity and variety of ESG data, EY and Microsoft are building a set of solutions unifying data intelligently, leveraging the Structured Data Manager and integrating with Microsoft Sustainability Manager, the companies say. These solutions support better, more informed decision-making, financial analysis, and external reporting for carbon and other critical ESG areas, according to their marketing materials.
EY has recently joined the Alliance to End Plastic Waste in order to help the Alliance develop more effective environmental, social and governance (ESG) measurement criteria for its work on the ground, which will help the Alliance to catalyze funding for Alliance-led projects.
Alongside more than 90 companies, project collaborators, allies and supporters who are committed to ending plastic waste in the environment, they will create clear and consistent metrics to form the foundation of sustainable, commercially viable business models that can be scaled for greater impact.
In July 2021, Micrsoft set a goal of fueling its operations entirely with renewable energy by 2025.
Moreover, by 2030 Microsoft will be carbon negative, and by 2050 Microsoft “will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975,” writes Brad Smith, president, and vice chair, in a blog.
Additionally, in a recent report from Morningstar Sustainalytics, which analyzed how data centers are doing in terms of tackling water risks, Microsoft was set as an example of a company that has had success in water sustainability, saying it is the only one in the analysis to receive top scores in water management and water risk management. Morningstar Sustainalytics says Microsoft’s water intensity also showed a significant decrease compared with its three-year average.
In its 2021 environmental sustainability report, Microsoft said it had diverted 15.2 thousand metric tons of waste from landfill in 2021.
