After its carbon footprint grew a shoe size or two in 2021, Microsoft notched a small decline in its carbon emissions last year. The cloud, software and gaming giant cut its planet-warming emissions 0.5% in 2022 while growing its overall business by 18%, Microsoft announced Wednesday.
Despite the improvement, the company wasn’t exactly celebrating its modest climate accomplishment.
“While this can be counted as progress, it’s not happening fast enough,” said Melanie Nakagawa, Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, in a LinkedIn post.
That’s because 96% of Microsoft’s emissions come from sources the company doesn’t directly control and that are going to be difficult to shrink, including the world’s energy grid and carbon associated with the supply chain, she said.
So the CSO is making a global call to action. “We call on governments and organizations who want to make meaningful change to join us in this race to build the foundations and overcome obstacles that will help us all meet our commitments for a healthier planet,” Nakagawa wrote.
In its 2022 Environmental Sustainability Report, released Wednesday, Microsoft provided details on its carbon cutting efforts. It also described its programs to help Microsoft customers measure and reduce their climate impacts and its work on international initiatives and policies to address climate change.
Those efforts include:
- The launch of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, a tool for calculating and reporting climate and water-use impacts.
- A preview of Microsoft Planetary Computer, a tool for managing ecosystems impacted by a company’s business operations.
- Allocating more than $600 million from its $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund, spread across more than 50 investments. Microsoft needs to disperse the rest of the dollars this year to reach its initial four-year investment target.
- Joining Carbon Call’s international coalition in support of developing a uniform system for tracking and reporting carbon emissions.
- Teaming up with TerraPraxis to develop technology to make it easier to site next generation, modular nuclear reactors at former coal plants.
Microsoft, which is considered a corporate leader on climate and environmental issues, also has sustainability initiatives to increase the supply of clean water, shrink its waste stream to zero, and protect the planet’s diversity of plants and animals.
But its climate efforts often garner the most attention. The Redmond, Wash.-based company reported releasing just under 13 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent last year. Washington state, by comparison, had carbon emissions of more than 102 million metric tons in 2019.
Microsoft has publicly reported its carbon impacts since 2017. Its emissions declined slightly in 2019 and 2020, but spiked in 2021 due to a COVID driven surge in business.
Microsoft has been carbon neutral in its electricity use since 2012 thanks to investments in clean energy sources. It has deals with clean power producers in 16 countries to provide 13.5 gigawatts of energy. The company on Wednesday separately announced a historic agreement with Washington fusion startup Helion Energy to purchase power from what could be the world’s first fusion plant.
Those investments and purchases were key to reducing the company’s emissions, according to the report.
But that still leaves those carbon sources that Nakagawa called out, a category referred to as scope 3 emissions. The biggest contributors to the company’s scope 3 emissions were purchased goods and services such as the silicon chips and other components of the company’s products; capital goods like concrete and steel used in construction; and the electricity associated with customers’ use of Microsoft products.
Microsoft aims to be carbon negative by the end of the decade. That means the company offsets its emissions by funding carbon-removing efforts elsewhere, including a deal with Climeworks to pull carbon from the atmosphere as well as agricultural and forestry programs to hold carbon in soil and trees.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to add information on past emissions data. On 5/15/2024 the story was corrected to clarify that Microsoft is carbon neutral in its electricity use alone.
