Veon welcomes Microsoft’s announcement that it aims to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits by 2030 and hopes to have removed enough carbon to account for all the direct emissions the company has ever made by 2050.
“This is an audacious, holistic and positive approach and is to be commended as Microsoft is one of the most recognisable and reputable brands in the world and is showing clear leadership for others to follow” according to Paul Brosnan, Marketing Director of Veon.
Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella said that the commitment will happen “not just across our direct emissions, but across our supply chain, too.” The tech giant had previously said its data centres would be 60% powered by renewable energy sources by the end of 2019 but has been accused by some environmental groups of relying too much on purchasing renewable energy credits to make up for its carbon emissions.
(Veon’s natural carbon storage solutions)
Brad Smith, President of Microsoft’s blog outlines the company’s plan to address the most significant threat to the planet with a ground-breaking approach to combatting Climate Change:
“While the world will need to reach net zero, those of us who can afford to move faster and go further should do so. That’s why today we are announcing an ambitious goal and a new plan to reduce and ultimately remove Microsoft’s carbon footprint.
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.
We recognize that progress requires not just a bold goal but a detailed plan. As described below, we are launching today an aggressive program to cut our carbon emissions by more than half by 2030, both for our direct emissions and for our entire supply and value chain. We will fund this in part by expanding our internal carbon fee, in place since 2012 and increased last year, to start charging not only our direct emissions, but those from our supply and value chains.
Solving our planet’s carbon issues will require technology that does not exist today. That’s why a significant part of our endeavor involves putting Microsoft’s balance sheet to work to stimulate and accelerate the development of carbon removal technology. Our new Climate Innovation Fund will commit to invest $1 billion over the next four years into new technologies and expand access to capital around the world to people working to solve this problem. We understand that this is just a fraction of the investment needed, but our hope is that it spurs more governments and companies to invest in new ways as well.
We will primarily deploy this capital in two areas: (1) to accelerate ongoing technology development by investing in project and debt finance; and (2) to invest in new innovations through equity and debt capital.
We’ll focus our funding on investments primarily based on four criteria:
(1) strategies that have the prospect of driving meaningful decarbonization, climate resilience, or other sustainability impact;
(2) additional market impact in accelerating current and potential solutions;
(3) relevance to Microsoft by creating technologies we can use to address our unpaid climate debt and future emissions; and
(4) consideration of climate equity, including for developing economies.
In addition to this new fund, we will continue to invest in carbon monitoring and modeling projects through our AI for Earth program, which has grown over the past two years to support more than 450 grantees across more than 70 countries”.
Hopefully, Microsoft’s announcement will lead other large corporations to follow suit and Veon commends their Carbon Negative pledge.