Today, Microsoft is joining Allianz, Amazon and S&P Global in announcing plans to launch the Climate Finance Foundation, a new initiative led by the Linux Foundation to build the OS-Climate Platform. This initiative leverages open-source analytics and open data to empower the investment community, as well as NGOs, academia and others, to help better model companies’ exposure to climate change. Microsoft is committing to sharing its significant and relevant sustainability data to advance the financial modeling and understanding of climate change impact.
Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Microsoft is investing heavily to address this challenge. In January, we announced a new sustainability strategy focusing on carbon, water, waste and biodiversity. We have made one of the boldest climate commitments of any company: Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030 and will remove all the carbon we have emitted since our founding by 2050. In addition, through the AI for Earth initiative, we are leveraging the power of Azure to help solve global environment challenges. In April, as part of our focus on biodiversity, we committed to an ambitious program to aggregate environmental data from around the world and put it to work in a planetary computer platform. With today’s commitment and our own data contribution to the Climate Finance Foundation, we seek to help build a global and open Data Commons of sustainability data.
The ability to access high-quality and transparent data about corporate sustainability will be critical to enable the broader community to build accurate and reliable financial models about the impact of climate change. As highlighted by the Linux Foundation, this will require the efforts and the data of many to succeed and we hope additional community stakeholders will join.
In April, we launched an Open Data Campaign to work to close the “data divide” and ensure that every organization can benefit from AI and the data economy. As part of the campaign, we committed to participating in open data collaborations to tackle the major challenges of our time. While a lot remains to be done, we are excited to take a step towards this objective. We will also work to ensure that the outcomes of the collaboration stay open, usable and empowering, in alignment with Microsoft’s Data Collaboration Principles.