President Brad Smith announces new step towards sustainability for 2020 with focus on protecting and preserving the world's biodiversity
Microsoft has committed to setting goals that will increasingly contribute to its sustainability efforts. In January, the company launched the Microsoft Carbon Initiative, which aims to make the company’s carbon footprint negative within the next decade. Despite the COVID-19 crisis shaping daily life for everyone, sustainability issues have become no less urgent or important. That’s why today, Microsoft President Brad Smith is announcing the second step in its sustainability efforts for 2020, focusing on preserving and protecting biodiversity and the health of the world’s ecosystems.
“Whenever we take on a new and complex societal issue, we strive to first learn and then define a principles-based approach to guide our efforts. This has been fundamental to our work around privacy protection, the ethical development of AI, our aggressive carbon targets, and our approach to biodiversity and ecosystems. Today, we are adopting four principles to guide our work to help achieve the global biodiversity goals,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft CEO.
Four principles adopted to guide our work to help achieve global biodiversity targets:
- Put data and digital technology to work. We can’t solve a problem we don’t fully understand. That’s why we’re going to aggregate environmental data from around the world and put it to work through computation and machine learning on a new planetary computer.
- Empower partners and customers around the world. We will use the Planetary Computer to develop and deploy digital technology that helps our partners and customers make environmental decisions across their organizational activities.
- Use our voice on ecosystem-related public policy issues. We will support and advocate for public policy initiatives that measure and manage ecosystems at national and global scales.
- Take responsibility for our land footprint. We will take responsibility for the environmental impacts of our direct operations by protecting more land than we use by 2025.
Putting Data and Digital Technology to Work: The Planetary Computer
“We don’t know enough about the species, biodiversity and ecosystems that are vital to our health and prosperity. Simply understanding where the world’s forests, grasslands and waterways are located remains a daunting task of environmental accounting. Understanding how species call these ecosystems home or why they thrive or decline is largely unknown. We simply can’t solve a problem we don’t fully understand,” says Brad.
Some points about The Planetary Computer:
This Planetary Computer would provide insights into critical questions that scientists, conservation organizations, and businesses already ask every day, often without an easy way to get a locally relevant answer. For example:
- Understanding tree density, land use and forest size has implications for biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation. Organizations typically undertake expensive field surveys or build custom solutions to understand local forests. The Planetary Computer will provide satellite imagery, cutting-edge machine learning tools and user-contributed data on forest boundaries, from which forest managers will have an integrated view of forest health.
- Urban planners and farmers rely on forecasts of water availability and flood risks to make educated guesses about land management. The Planetary Computer will provide satellite data, local measurements of streams and groundwater, and predictive algorithms that will empower planners and farmers to make data-driven decisions about water resources.
- Wildlife conservation organizations rely on their own local surveys, global views of wildlife populations and suitable wildlife habitats. The Planetary Computer will combine information on land types and ecosystems with the best available data on where species live, allowing a global community of wildlife biologists to benefit from each other’s data.
- Combating climate change requires organizations to measure and manage natural resources that sequester carbon, such as trees, grasslands, and soil. The Planetary Computer will combine satellite imagery with AI to provide up-to-date information on ecosystems and provide a platform to leverage predictive models to estimate global carbon stocks and inform land-use decisions that affect our ability to address climate change.
Read the full article in full on our News Center for more information and see the Microsoft's Sustainability Commitment GuideMicrosoft's commitment to sustainability for more information.
About Microsoft
Microsoft enables digital transformation in the era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. The company has been in Brazil for 30 years and is one of the 110 subsidiaries of Microsoft Corporation, founded in 1975. Since 2003, the company has invested more than R$600 million in providing free technology to 3,191 NGOs in Brazil, benefiting several social projects. Between 2011 and 2017, Microsoft has supported more than 6,200 startups in Brazil, with an investment of more than US$219 million in cloud credits.
