This Earth Day We Can All Go Net Zero in Australia, Together

Sustainability has been added to our top priority list, as a new company value at Salesforce. Why? Because now is the time to act on climate change, with bold action, collaboration and innovative ideas.

At this year’s World Tour Sydney Pip Marlow, CEO & EVP, ANZ/ASEAN at Salesforce, delivered a keynote calling for action to build a better future that benefits everyone — by working together to achieve net zero emissions.

“It’s not just what we’re doing ourselves, it’s how we help others.” 

This is the crux of Salesforce’s 1-1-1 model, which dedicates 1% of equity, 1% of product and 1% of employees’ time back to our communities. The more we all succeed and grow, the more we can help others.

It is clear that we need to work together to make a positive change, as the planet belongs to every person, community, ecosystem, and nation. This bold action will take new thinking, which strives for equality for all, from our people, our partners and our planet. Creating equality is not just the right thing to do — it makes good business sense.

That’s why we are celebrating Earth Day this year, with the theme of Invest in Our Planet. We echo the idea that we need to act boldly, innovate broadly, and implement equitably. It is indeed going to take a joint effort to rethink the future of our planet.

So we are inviting our extended community to join us in this journey towards Team Earth. As we move towards a low, or ideally no carbon economy, every organisation and sector will need to fundamentally rewire how they operate, to think of more efficient ways of working. We like to call this success from anywhere.

Our team is committed to accelerating this path towards net zero, because everything rests on a stable climate. We have mapped out our Climate Action Plan which focused on six key priorities; reducing emissions, removing carbon, education, innovation, regulation and ecosystem restoration.

We have a number of innovative projects that are taking action and shifting the dial on climate change in Australia, and we shared these trailblazing initiatives as part of Salesforce World Tour Sydney 2022.

Watch the World Tour Sydney 2022 Main Show on Salesforce+ and stay tuned for more content.

Greenfleet partners with Dja Dja Wurrung people on the path to net zero

In Australia, Salesforce is championing bold solutions across the country by supporting and collaborating on forward thinking projects. In Victoria, we are partnering with Greenfleet to increase biodiversity. This unique project is in collaboration with the Dja Dja Wurrung people to restore degraded farmland in Victoria. The project aims to plant more than 150,000 native trees over the entire property and to provide resources and opportunities for the local community.

Wayne Wescott, CEO, Greenfleet shared that, as a nonprofit, Greenfleet is interested in enabling individuals and corporations to take climate action — with carbon offsetting a critical part of the transition to a low carbon economy.

“At the core of what we do is ecosystem restoration. It’s more than planting trees. We create canopies and undergrowth with the aim to sequester 10 million tonnes of carbon throughout this decade,” says Wayne Wescott. “We only plant local native forests, which improves biodiversity and creates a living habitat to attract wildlife back to the land”.

“Technology is the backbone of our business, and we have full data on every square metre of our land. Salesforce enables us to track this data”, he said.

South Australia leading the path towards net zero

Another project blazing a trail is with the South Australian government to accelerate the state’s journey to net zero, with the smart use of Net Zero Cloud. We are working with renewable energy producers to save more than 320,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year.

The South Australian government is on a mission towards net zero. “We believe we can do this through smart technology, renewable energy, hydrogen and with technology support to monitor the dynamic changes,” said Mark Wadewitz, Green Economy Lead, Government of SA, Department of Trade and Investment.

It is also really important for the public sector and private sectors to come together to solve these problems. Australia already has a net zero by 2050 target, what we need is a 2030 target and a clear plan to guide industry, right investment to get to 2030/2050.

Making design more sustainable with Canva

Canva is aiming to make it possible for everyone to design, and has a mission as a company to do the most good in the world. “People want to see that companies care as much as they do. People are demanding organisations to step up and take accountability,” explained Jared Ingersoll, Sustainability Lead at Canva. 

If we are looking at our own footprint alone, it is not enough. So going beyond the net zero targets by focussing on human impacts, that contributes to the problem. We have to look at more integrated solutions like decarbonising, investing in reforesting, biodiversity protections, and elevating communities out of vulnerability and insecurity in developing nations. 

Sometimes not knowing how to solve these complex problems can put things on hold. For example, we want to decarbonise our operations by 2028, which is kind of impossible. We don’t know the answers, we have to aim for it, so we are narrating our journey as we walk the path.

Actions the team have taken to improve sustainability at Canva is focussed education and alignment. Raising the base knowledge of sustainability across the organisation is crucial, from onboarding messages to our supply chain and people policies. Another key action is to decarbonise our footprint.

Discover your path towards net zero emissions

Our own journey towards net zero

Salesforce has been on a sustainability journey for over a decade. In fact, we have reached net zero emissions today, across our full value chain, and have reached 100% renewable energy for our global operations. We did this by switching to renewable energy equivalent to our electric energy usage. 

We understand that everyone has a role to play, and we are a founding partner of 1t.org to help restore ecosystems. As part of our 1-1-1 model, we have built Net Zero Cloud to help organisations accelerate their own sustainability journey.

Our ongoing Climate Action Plan is focused on six key priorities: emissions reduction, carbon removal, ecosystem restoration, education and mobilisation, innovation, regulation and policy.

“In this climate emergency, we need every organisation to get to net zero as fast as possible. Now that Salesforce has reached net zero emissions, we want to use our technology and best practices to help organisations reach their climate goals, too.”

The emphasis on innovative thinking also allows us to collaborate with the broader ecosystem – our customers, partners and communities we work in. People who are on the frontline of fighting climate change have our support — scientists, grassroots activists and non profits.

“What excites me is that you can now spend less time measuring your footprint and more time finding solutions to reduce your impact,” says Alexandra McDonald. One of the hardest things to measure is the emissions in the value chain, as it involves your entire network, this can now be tracked to give you a clearer picture of your collective impact. This starts to link organisations together to find solutions that help one another.

Net Zero Cloud was born from our own journey, and provides visibility and actionable insights into an organisation’s own emissions, as well the emissions of its entire supply chain. This takes a lot of the pain out of what can be a really manual, time consuming process which usually is made up of unreliable data and data sets sitting all over the place.

One of the key innovations on offer is the ability to track scope 3 emissions in the value chain — these are the emissions in the supply chain, within your network and suppliers — which is often the hardest area to track for most organisations. By allowing these emissions to be visible, it gives the organisation the power to choose more efficient suppliers, and reduce their overall impact.

With Net Zero Cloud, companies can have confidence that the data is reliable and investor grade, suitable for third party audits and inclusion in annual reports.

Importantly, this solution allows chief sustainability officers to spend less time in trying to calculate the organisation’s footprint, and more time taking action on climate action.

Net zero economy means jobs growth

The good news is that a net zero economy means more jobs. A recent study predicts that 250,000 jobs could be added to the Australian economy by 2070 if a net zero pathway is chosen. This new economy will need carbon accountants, low emission consultants, battery technology researchers and many other specialists. This will also include evolving roles for the c-suite in managing environmental and social governance opportunities.

Salesforce is committed to collaborating with our community. To drive meaningful climate action at scale, we are taking positive actions as individuals, business leaders and communities at large. We see the path to climate action is of vital importance, and we aim to inspire businesses and individuals to build a more fair, equitable and sustainable future. 

Watch the World Tour Sydney 2022 Main Show on Salesforce+ to learn more about our value of sustainability.