How to Reduce Carbon Footprint with Microsoft Sustainability Manager

We are living in a world in which nearly everyone is concerned about environmental degradation. Humans are in the difficult role of being both the destroyers and the only possible saviours of Mother Nature. We can feel the impacts of environmental degradation, and you would be well versed in the natural impacts we are going through.

The earth has given us everything to survive and fulfill our basic needs, but consumption of natural resources and carbon-based pollution are key drivers of climate change, poverty, water scarcity, energy shortage, depletion of natural resources, increased weather-related disasters, wildlife extinction, and more. One of the major sources of such damage is industry. The constant exploitation of resources to make more profit in less time continues unabated, and while it may help some economic measures, it is pushing humans towards destruction at an increased rate.

Times are changing, and so are the people. Industrialists and market leaders are more likely now to express concerns about the environmental sustainability and how to reduce their impact by leveraging sustainable solutions.

A survey published by Deloitte based on 2,000+ business leaders reported a huge gap between planning and implementing the actions to reduce the impacts and carbon footprints.

Planning a sustainability goal, implementing it properly, and tracking progress in real-time are the most vital tasks businesses must execute with the utmost priority to sustain climate change. For businesses used to manually tracking their performance, goals related to emissions, carbon footprint, and other sustainability-related progress will be nearly impossible as complexity grows and demands from regulators and the marketplace become more intense.

Microsoft has introduced an advanced solution called Sustainability Manager to help businesses and leaders to track and boost sustainability goals throughout the journey at various levels. It allows businesses to take proactive measures to record, report, and reduce environmental impacts as part of their approach to ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance).

What is Microsoft Sustainability Manager?

The Microsoft Sustainability Manager is a solution built on Azure and Power Platform to track all carbon emissions and footprints, making the process of tracking goal data simple and efficient. It collects the raw data from internal systems and external sources, centralizes the information, and integrates it to help an organization track the progress at any stage of their sustainability journey.

It enables organizations to use technologies such as business intelligence, artificial intelligence, and cloud services to obtain real-time data updates on emission activities, report the impacts, track progress, and make actionable decisions.

How Sustainability Manager helps reduce carbon emissions

It might sound unusual to reduce carbon emissions using a computer application. But this solution provides a platform that makes sense of the connection between humans and the environment to help us track, report, and reduce emissions. The Sustainability Manager tracks the emissions caused by organizations, records the data in real-time, and shows it on a dashboard combining Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions (based on Greenhouse Gas Protocol). This is where Microsoft Azure and Power Platform servics like Power BI come into play.