Mankiran Chowhan, VP, Enterprise Business, Salesforce India believes it is vital for every company to do its part to fight climate change.
What are the building blocks of a modern enterprise? How do you look at these tenets for aligning innovations with a sustainable future?
Today, customers, investors, employees, and stakeholders want to be associated with companies that take the lead on sustainability. Increasingly, consumers are actively seeking to buy from environmentally sustainable companies. The individual who is gravitating towards making a values-based purchasing decision is also applying the same logic in the choice of employers and employment. There is an increasing need for stakeholders and shareholders to have a clear sense of purpose within their organisations, which is driving their revenues.
In the present scenario, it is imperative for businesses to ensure that their sustainability goals are aligned with long term growth strategies, in addition to financial and operational priorities. However, as organizations set their climate goals, they face a severe shortage of sustainability talent available that can help meet their increasingly large commitments. What happened in cloud computing 20 years ago is happening in sustainability today. According to Trail to NetZero’ – commissioned by Salesforce in collaboration with YouGov, 84% of individual respondents noted the importance of technology in achieving a net zero target.
Corporate sustainability is charging into the realm of innovation. Sustainability practitioners in the corporate space are challenging the status quo — flipping traditional business models on their heads and thinking differently to find the competitive advantage in a more sustainable solution. While modern technology models, new business models, and new values are reshaping business, the workforce too needs to pivot to the capabilities, skill sets, and tools necessary for a net zero economy transition.
What is your vision to accelerate the world’s largest businesses to Net Zero? How is Salesforce implementing its climate action plan?
Salesforce’s sustainability vision is to bring the full power of technology and innovation to accelerate the world’s largest organizations to net zero, sequester one hundred gigatons of carbon through conserving, restoring, and growing one trillion trees, protect our oceans, and energize the ecopreneur revolution. Importantly, we are focusing on our own operations and net zero journeys, and on enabling the net zero journeys of our partners, customers, and peers. We all need to get to net zero emissions now.
In 2022, we initiated the institutionalization of our sustainability program in India to make our sustainability journey more inclusive. Salesforce has also undertaken a nationwide tree plantation effort in collaboration with various partners with a goal of planting one hundred million trees by 2030 globally and one million trees in India. In fact, we recently announced the purchase of 280,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable energy certificates from small, distributed energy projects to accelerate clean electricity access in emerging markets.
Not only does Salesforce aim to reduce the emissions that we put into the atmosphere, but we also sequester carbon to offset any emissions that remain with nature-based solutions and technology by delivering Net Zero Cloud at Scale. Every company needs to do its part to fight against climate change. Our customers too are trying to figure out how to accelerate their net zero journeys, and how to reduce emissions in a credible and meaningful way. That is why we built Net Zero Cloud and were able to reduce a reporting process that took six months to just six weeks.
Today, we are helping companies like Mastercard, Crowley Maritime, JetBlue, TELUS, Clif Bar, Deloitte Germany, Miller Knoll, and others do the same. With Net Zero Cloud, organizations can get sustainability insights to achieve their climate goals and take action with ‘what-if’ analysis to visualize progress; setting goals in line with science-based targets; tracking scope 3 emissions across the supply chain; and capturing waste management data — all in one place.
Edited by Celecia Johnson
