At a time when reports are leaking out around how investor support to ESG has tanked over the past six to eight months, there’s some good data that is coming out that should warm the cockles of all sustainability supporters. Google’s Sustainability Survey notwithstanding, some Big-Tech companies are pulling their considerable weight.
SDxCentral came out with a scorecard two months ago that delves into how some of the world’s largest industries have done in terms of their own stated ambitions around climate impact and environment sustainability. They’ve updated some stuff and re-published the same article. Before accessing the ratings per se, it’s important to understand how it was arrived at.
Here’s how the ratings have been worked out
The sole purpose of the exercise is to understand each tech vendor’s eco-initiatives and impact based on public data and disclosures, with their net-zero commitments, greenhouse emissions, total annual emissions, renewable energy commitments and annual energy use and renewables as a percentage being key factors.
The publication has also noted that smaller initiatives of these vendors weren’t included in the scoring which was limited to emissions and energy metrics. Each vendor’s percentage was based on 20 possible points and then converted to a five-point scale. Which is what you would see in the graphic below, which SDxCentral has published along with the post.
Just to draw further clarity, science-based sustainability commitments could include a company supporting the Paris Agreement to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Emissions are split into scope-1, scope-2 and scope-3, where the first categorizes emissions coming directly from sources owned or controlled by a company.
Scope-2 are indirect emissions associated with power, steam, heat and cooling while Scope-3 relate to all indirect emissions not part of the earlier scope that usually occur in a company’s upstream and downstream value chain. Upstream refers to suppliers of a company while downstream refers to an organization’s customers.
Based on these parameters, the publication has up until now looked at a clutch of companies such as IBM, Dell, Cisco, VMWare and a few others. In case our readers want to see specific tech giants and their ESG reality check, please add to the comments and we will pass it on to the publishers.
