No Time To Waste: Moving From Sustainability Intentions To Action
An article ghostwritten for an executive at a major cloud services provider and published on Forbes.com.
Sustainability has moved into the mainstream of business goals, with organizations in the Forbes Global 2000 and beyond now making commitments to become more sustainable. That means different things to different organizations in different industries: anything from cutting employees’ plastic bottle use to pursuing carbon neutrality with offsets, to our own recent commitment to operate entirely on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030.
But a common problem has emerged: companies recognize environmental efforts as important, but they’re slow to implement actionable targets.
In research we conducted in partnership with IDG, 90% of global information technology (IT) leaders marked sustainability as a priority but only 67% had a sustainability target in place for their organization.
As a technology business, we find that technology teams can be centers of sustainable innovation, even when they face challenges in pinpointing their best opportunities for optimization. When companies first embark on their sustainability initiatives, they need to work through a few issues to begin their progress on sustainability.
Competing pressures
Today, business and technology leaders have a lot to consider beyond sustainability. They need to ensure that their applications and infrastructure are fast and powerful for their users. They have to prioritize resiliency and eliminate downtime, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the entire business world had to become digital overnight. They also have to make sure that their products are both secure and cost-effective, as they grow their customer base.
Then sustainability comes into play, with products and infrastructure under increasing pressure to be environmentally friendly. Organizations are also expected to deal with the issue of carbon reduction, which can be confusing on its own.
It’s no wonder why progress on sustainability falters. All of these factors compete for attention, leading to cognitive overload, decision-making paralysis or delays.
Solving for sustainability
Since our founding in 1998, we’ve built sustainability into everything that we do. We engage with customers across the globe to help them make their own operations more sustainable. Here are some of the common approaches we’ve learned to help customers make real progress against their sustainability targets.
1) Bring technical and sustainability teams together
Providing space for teams to collaborate can inspire new sustainability innovations. Our sustainability team’s mission is to build technology that helps users do more for the planet. This guides our strategy, infrastructure, and product efforts that help us run the cleanest cloud in the industry. Further, the collaboration between our sustainability and engineering teams have led to breakthrough innovations like optimizing our data centers to work harder when renewable energy is abundant.
Including technical and sustainability teams at every decision-making level can help your company build a more sustainable business. Etsy, one of our customers, enables close collaboration between their technical and sustainability teams. This helped reduce Etsy’s energy consumption and power their marketplace with 100% renewable electricity.
2) Share a common goal or a priority KPI
Projects can get complicated quickly, particularly when migrating your infrastructure or building new applications. To keep things simple, agree on a common key performance indicator (KPI) related to sustainability like carbon emissions, energy or materials use. Then incorporate it just like you would more common KPIs like resiliency, price or security.
We incorporate sustainability impact in our customer onboarding process, so that our engineers and sales teams can help you design your cloud footprint with tools and services that prioritize sustainability. By considering carbon emissions, and pricing the social cost of carbon into ROI for customers, decision-makers can assess sustainability impact more consistently with financial impact.
3) Don’t create more unsustainable, technical debt for yourself
Prioritize sustainability early in your project planning, so that downstream impacts in design and deployment contribute to your overall carbon reduction efforts.
We recently tested how presenting lower carbon location options to our users might influence their choice on where to run their application. While all users were 19% more likely to choose a low carbon region, new users were 50% more likely to make the green choice. They weren’t burdened by previous region choices and were free to reduce their carbon impact even more.
4) Design sustainability into everything you do
Sustainability isn’t a one-and-done proposition. Every action needs to be considered through the lens of sustainability. Different audiences can benefit from sustainability signals if they’re surfaced at the right moment and in the right context to help them take action or make a decision.
For prospective app developers on our cloud platform, we recently released a region picker. This tool helps them assess key factors like price, latency, and carbon footprint when choosing which cloud region to run on. For individual users, we include a green leaf icon inside the console next to our cloud regions that use the highest percentage of carbon-free energy.
Helping you take action
Going from sustainability ambition to action isn’t always easy. At our company, we want to help you make progress against your specific sustainability goals. By making changes in your organization’s leadership, infrastructure and product design processes, you can finally help your organization contribute to a greener planet for all.