Blog Details
🌍 Net Zero Cloud And The Importance Of Sustainability
Developing a Sustainability strategy, defining goals, creating and execute action plans, comprehensive data collection (from the company itself and suppliers) and, finally, reporting on your progress to understand if you are achieving those goals, can be highly complex and very data-intensive.
What is Net Zero?
The concept of Net Zero Emissions reflects the equilibrium between greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere and those that were taken from it. The aim is to achieve a balance in which emissions are offset by removals, resulting in no increase to emissions. This concept reflects the quantification of a company's environmental impact and the measures needed to reduce or offset its emissions/impact.
How Are Greenhouse Gas Emissions Calculated?
Greenhouse gases (GHG) are atmospheric gases that absorb and retain the heat from the sun, contributing to the green house effect, and to the increase of Earth's temperature. The first step in GHG management is to identify the sources of emissions of all the company's operational activities, which enables the establishment of a comprehensive inventory of GHG emissions associated with operations and/or products.
Emission sources along with emission factors make it possible to convert activity data (energy consumed or activities performed) into GHG equivalent. Emission factors are geographically specific and regularly updated by various organizations. Thus, identifying emission sources and conversion factors specifics is essential to making accurate, auditable, transparent and actionable assessments of greenhouse gas emissions.
Why Is It Important?
Some scientific studies argue that to avoid the consequences of climate change and preserve the planet, increased overall temperature should be limited to 1.5°Cabove pre-industrial levels. Currently, Earth is already close to being 1.1°Cwarmer than in the late 19th century, and emissions continue to increase.
To stop this effect, more than 145 countries, including the largest polluters, such as China, the United States, India, and the European Union, set net targets covering close to 90% of global emissions.
More than 9,000 companies, more than 1,000cities, more than 1,000 educational institutions and more than 600 financial institutions have joined the Race to Net Zero, calling for strong and immediate action to halt global emissions by 2030.
To keep global warming below 1.5°C -as required by the Paris Agreement - emissions must be reduced by 45% by 2030and net zero emissions must be achieved by 2050.
The European Commission has adopted a set of proposals to align EU's climate, energy, transport and tax policies with the intention of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030,compared to the levels of 1990, less than 90% by 2040 and without net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Very ambitious goals that will impact the way companies manage sustainability.
What Does Net Zero Mean For Companies
Regulations such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive are becoming more demanding when it comes to organizations attention and care for sustainability. Although in some cases this requirement is currently more targeted at large companies, it will influence the entire business ecosystem where these companies operate, from suppliers to customers.
The directive sets out the obligation for companies to use reporting standards to meet their legal obligations relating to communicating information about sustainability performance. Compliance with these standards aims to solve problems in the quality of sustainability reports and allow stakeholders to have a reliable perspective of the sustainability-related risks to which companies are exposed.
Salesforce Net Zero Cloud – A Companion On This Journey
In this context, it is essential that companies adopt solutions that allow for the gathering of viable and correct data, extraction of information from this data and simultaneously the creation of reports in a simple and reliable way, which complies with the different reporting standards active in different regions of the world. This is why solutions such as Net Zero Cloud from Salesforce are starting to become essential platforms.
Salesforce Net Zero Cloud is a sustainability management platform for the company which allows organizations to trail, follow-up, and calculate environmental impact and ensuing analyses, such as the analysis of emissions reduction and potential impacts of the adoption of new measures. Some of the functionalities included in Net Zero Cloud are:
• Carbon footprint tracking across the entire company's operation (including energy and resource management, supply chains emissions tracking,....);
• Management and report data on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, waste, and water usage;
• Real-time visual dashboards and reports, in compliance with global reporting standards and frameworks;
• Forecasting tools to allow companies to study different sustainability strategies and their impact;
• Manage carbon offsets and credits, helping companies achieve net zero targets through both reduction and compensation strategies.
These functionalities, often associated with AI, allow for more effective automated data gathering, integration with various systems, data predictive analytics, anomaly detection, automated reporting, and real-time monitoring and feedback. Salesforce Net Zero Cloud empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions to meet sustainability goals efficiently.
Want to successfully navigate the journey towards Net Zero? Need guidance on implementing Net Zero Cloud? Reach out to us and find out how Net Zero Cloud can help you achieve your sustainability goals!
Contact us to devise a strategy, to find solutions or to just schedule a demo. We’re happy to help!