One third of big business not on-track for net zero by 2050: Microsoft

A recent report by Microsoft and Goldsmith University of London reveals that over a third of Australian businesses with over 200 employees are not on track to meet their net zero 2050 targets.

Brett Shoemaker, director of sustainability, Microsoft
CEDA

At the Committee for Economic Development of Australia’s (CEDA) recent webinar, ‘Is Australian business on-track for net-zero by 2050’, Brett Shoemaker, director of sustainability at Microsoft discussed the report, ‘Accelerating the journey to net zero’, developed in partnership with the team of researchers led by Dr Chris Brauer.

The report was based on quantitative and qualitative research of 700 business leaders and over 1000 Australian employees, in organisations with over 200 employees to understand the key challenges facing Australian business, in their carbon reduction journey.

According to Dr Brauer, “We found that this was largely the result of something returning a delivery deficit. So they have very, very strong sustainability targets, many organisations are very ambitious, finding it quite easy to raise the level of ambition, but challenged to execute against that, to be able to achieve that target.”

The groups that had the weakest scores in achieving their targets are the ones that are unable to unlock the business case for driving sustainability targets and who lacked sustainable agility, said Brauer.

“There was really two kind of key challenges that we found that were very specific to the Australian marketplace and that was a lack of investment in technology and a skills gap,” he said.

When it comes to technology, while 80 percent of the leaders in the study acknowledged that technology is critical to achieve sustainability goals, only half were actually investing in digital sustainability tools.

The short supply of sustainability skills was also considered a driving factor in the gap to meet net zero targets.

“You can’t really decouple these things: The skills of the digital, the transformational skills and the sustainability skills need to be married hand in hand in order to achieve sustainability strategies,” said Brauer.

“This skills gap presents a very significant challenge in Australia and the organisations that we saw that were looking at their inability to achieve a 2050 goal typically had very highly statistically significant skills gaps in their workforces. Which was the primary barrier that was going to challenge them to achieve their ambition.”

Microsoft has committed to a target to be climate negative by 2030, which means that the business will be removing more carbon from the atmosphere than they emit, and by 2050 they will have removed all carbon that has been emitted through their operations since the company was founded in 1975.

According to Shoemaker, “That's our moonshot goal. It shows up each day though in the activities that we do from our products and services and our devices. Whether it's our cloud and AI services in terms of reducing energy consumption, physical footprint or even building more sustainable products to sell.”

Commenting on the report, Shoemaker said, “It's for that reason that we embarked on this work because it's not just about our ability to reach net zero but our collective ability to do so.”