Climate change is increasing, regulations are rising, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) assets are growing by 15% annually.

Organisations are looking to advance their sustainability progress and opportunities, but recording and reporting that progress remains challenging. Measuring and monitoring sustainable transformation at scale requires data-driven solutions.

Microsoft introduced Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to help other organisations accelerate their sustainability progress to reduce their environmental footprint. With support from Microsofts partners, they are continuing to add ESG capabilities and release updates to the extensible platform. 

The goal is to help organisations around the globe unify sustainability data intelligence and more easily track and reduce the environmental footprint of their operations and value chains. 

Reining in more elusive emissions data

With Microsoft Sustainability Manager, organisations can store and report on emissions data across Scopes 1 and 2 and harder to track Scope 3 indirect value chain emissions that account for a disproportionate share of most organisations’ footprints. 

With this update, Microsoft enables organisations to ingest waste data, track waste partners, track disposal methods and materials, and make required calculations based on tailored models.

Customers can also track any fuel- or power-related emissions that occur within their operations from a leased facility or asset, calculate the emissions according to activity and reporting needs, and set and track goals for future efficiencies and reduction.

Other enhancements to help customers boost and scale their efforts

Microsoft Sustainability Manager provides usability, security, goal tracking capabilities, and more. New features enhance user role assignment and access management capabilities and improve error handling with more actionable error messaging. Users can analyse and understand emissions by comparing monthly performance year over year and drilling into emissions sources and activities by organisational unit, to six levels deep, through a new deep analysis page.

Expanded data model enables tracking of water data and finer configurability

Microsoft has updated the data model to enable the addition of custom entities, ingesting unique attributes such as leaked emissions from a lab or emissions caused by electrified fleet modernisation, allowing customers to tailor calculations to address their business needs.

Environmental Credit Service to enable end-to-end ESG asset lifecycle 

Voluntary environmental markets, including carbon markets, are struggling to mature and scale to meet the rising demand for reliable and traceable environmental products like carbon credits, which organisations seek on their path to net zero.

With Environmental Credit Service, Microsoft overcame these challenges with a common infrastructure to help optimise the supply ecosystem. The service will help decrease time to market and increase the quality and quantity of credits by automating, simplifying, and securing the lifecycle processes used by ecological project owners, verifiers, and registries, giving credit purchasers more confidence and fueling marketplace momentum. 

“With integrated capabilities from Microsoft and our partners, we’re enabling organisations to gain the transparency and insights they need to manage their environmental footprint, embed sustainability through their organisation and value chain, and make strategic business investments that drive value,” says Shefy MAnayil Kareem, General Manager, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.