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Salesforce’s Sustainability Cloud Empowers Business to Drive Impactful Climate Action

Salesforce reinforces sustainability commitments at UNGA and Climate Week NYC with stakeholder engagement, STEM investments, and a new carbon accounting product.

Published 5 years ago | About a 5 minute read

Image: Salesforce

Salesforce today launches Salesforce Sustainability Cloud, a carbon accounting product for businesses to drive climate action that will accelerate the world’s efforts towards carbon neutrality. It was designed to provide businesses with a trusted sustainability platform that gives them a 360-degree view of their environmental impact and provides data-driven insights to make change the planet will notice.

Whether they know it yet or not, climate change is one of the most pressing challenges businesses are facing today; and when it comes to protecting the planet, all stakeholders have a key role to play. Global sustainable investing grew to more than $30 trillion in 2018, a 34 percent increase in two years; and this year, many CEOs have cited climate change as the top risk to their organization’s growth.

Introducing Salesforce Sustainability Cloud

Salesforce is committed to delivering a sustainable, low-carbon future and supports the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which help frame the company’s global strategy and technology innovations. Since its founding, Salesforce has directed its innovation efforts to drive positive social impact through serving the interests of all its stakeholders — including the environment. Salesforce’s vision is for customers to use the entire Customer 360 Platform for environmental good.

As Patrick Flynn, VP of sustainability at Salesforce, told Sustainable Brands (SB): "A megatrend we [have] witnessed was that the financial sector has increasingly been asking for a tool which provides the same level of trust and timeliness for ESG data as what they typically see for investor-grade financial data. Our big ‘aha’ moment came when we realized that what we originally had built to calculate our own GHG emissions would be valuable for our customers, as well. Calculating and managing our carbon footprint used to be such a painful and inefficient process — we’ve now reduced a six-month process down to six weeks."

Salesforce Sustainability Cloud enables businesses to quickly track, analyze and report reliable environmental data to help them reduce their carbon emissions. A company’s carbon data is easily surfaced in Salesforce Einstein Analytics, which creates dynamic reports and dashboards — both for audit purposes and for executive engagement — with insights that empower businesses to drive climate action programs at scale.

As Ari Alexander, General Manager of the Salesforce Sustainability Cloud, explained to SB: “When we first built this tool for ourselves, it focused on travel, data centers and real estate data. What we didn’t expect was that a surprising number of companies with complex global supply chain and manufacturing footprints quickly grew eager to work with us to tailor the platform to requests specific to their industry.

“The North Star that guides our KPIs is focused on how helpful we can be to our customers’ own strategic imperatives to draw down their environmental impact. This tool supports their policies, priorities and programs with robust data analytics and a highly detailed and easily repeatable inventory management system."

Salesforce’s new sustainability commitments

As headline sponsor of Climate Week NYC next week, Salesforce will join stakeholders from around the world — including government officials, businesses, NGOs and citizens — to highlight game-changing climate innovations and catalyze bold new commitments.

Salesforce — along with a coalition of business, civil society and UN leaders — has committed to set 1.5°C science-based emissions-reduction targets aligned with a net-zero future, responding to what the latest climate science indicates is needed to limit the worst impacts of climate change.
Salesforce will participate in the first-ever UN Youth Climate Summit on Saturday, September 21, to support young leaders who are driving climate action, as part of a weekend of events leading up to the UN Climate Action Summit and UNGA.
To support STEM literacy, Salesforce is giving a $250,000 grant to EcoRise, a K–12 school-based nonprofit, to expand environmental STEM education programming in New York City schools. During Climate Week, a group of K–12 teachers will participate in a day of professional development with EcoRise, Salesforce and the DOE Office of Sustainability, and receive an overview of the SDGs and classroom resources with a focus on climate action.
As a founding member of USA Chapter of The Prince's Accounting for Sustainability Project (A4S) CFO Leadership Network, Salesforce is excited to host the east coast launch event. A4S is aimed at enabling sustainable organizations that generate positive value for the economy, society and the environment.

In addition, Salesforce continues to focus on creating a sustainable, low-carbon future by driving towards its Step Up Declaration commitments, made at last year’s Global Climate Action Summit; delivering a carbon-neutral cloud to all customers; committing to reaching 100 percent renewable energy by 2022; and advocating for policies that set the planet, and the geographies the company operates in, on a path to a low-carbon economy.

"At Salesforce, we've always believed business is the greatest platform for change. Addressing climate change with speed and at scale is critical to see a turning point by 2020," said Suzanne DiBianca, Chief Impact Officer and EVP of corporate relations at Salesforce. “Businesses must work together to be the greatest force for climate transformation the world has ever seen.”

This post was updated on September 27 with additional quotes.