Beyond Net Zero: Focusing on Nature This Earth Day

Sustainability is a year-round imperative

In Australia, we know all too well the impact nature loss and climate change can have on our environment. Devastating tree loss due to bushfires, koalas being listed as endangered, higher water temperatures and the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef are just some examples of the disastrous impacts climate change is having on our environment. 

This for me signals the urgency of the climate crisis and the need to protect and restore nature on a larger scale. While commitments and policies are a great signal for change, I believe that we need tangible plans in place to drive action faster. So as we mark Earth Day, I want to change the conversation from discussion to action. Let’s go beyond the goals already reached and look at how to take leadership on climate change and nature restoration.

At Salesforce, we’ve recently announced our Nature Positive Strategy. The strategy outlines how Salesforce is addressing the nature crisis and the actions we’re taking to move towards net zero. The strategy isn’t just aimed at slowing nature loss — it is focused on reversing nature damage by restoring and regenerating the natural world around us.

Striving for Nature Positive

Because climate change and nature loss are inextricably linked, a nature positive approach has become critical to our sustainability efforts. In our eyes, a nature positive future is one that sustains life, leading to healthy ecosystems and by extension, healthy and thriving humans and businesses. 

We often talk about the concept of business being a platform for change at Salesforce — it’s our way of saying that organisations can feel empowered to truly live their values and create a more inclusive and sustainable world. It also means that corporations are uniquely placed to form partnerships with government agencies and make sustainability commitments on a broader scale.  

Our plan sits in the wider context of government action, with pledges made by the governments of both Australia and New Zealand. Both nations have committed to a UN pledge to protect 30% of land and seas by 2030. Australia also released its own Nature Positive plan, which includes a biodiversity certificates scheme that will empower businesses, organisations and individuals to pursue landscape restoration. 

Our strategy places people, livelihoods and the need for climate justice at its core. Taking an integrated approach, the strategy supports and accelerates our Climate Action Plan and the net zero commitments we’ve made as a business.

The strategy is made up of three components: 

• Lead on nature restoration at scale
• Reduce our nature impacts
• Accelerate customer success and the nature positive movement

Putting plans into action

The three components of our strategy are our north star, empowering us to focus our efforts on areas where we can have the most tangible impact. Here’s what this looks like in practice. 

Reduce our nature impacts

A journey like this starts by looking inwards. As a tech company, we know that our direct impacts on nature aren’t substantial when compared with other sectors with value chains directly dependent on natural resources. However, for a forward-looking strategy like this one to be successful, we need to be accountable for how we impact nature. 

To do this, we’re actively measuring our impacts and dependencies on nature across our business, evaluating all areas of our business — including data centres, offices, value chain, people, and products.

We’ve also been active supporters of Business for Nature’s 2022 campaign, Make it Mandatory. The campaign is calling for large businesses and financial institutions to assess and disclose their risks, impacts, and dependencies on biodiversity by 2030.

Lead on nature restoration at scale

We know it’s not simply the actions we take in our own business that will make a difference. That’s why we’re making innovative investments, supporting ecopreneurs and forging partnerships to drive nature restoration at scale. 

Some of our initiatives in this space include: 

• Co-founding 1t.org, an initiative to help us protect and restore 1 trillion trees by 2030. You can see our progress here; in two years, we’re already at 44 million trees — including the 34,000 trees planted in partnership with Green Fleet as part of efforts to restore degraded farmland in Ngulambarra in central Victoria.
• Locally, Salesforce has provided grants to the One Tree Planted project. The not-for-profit is creating a koala wildlife corridor in northern New South Wales. This corridor will be habitat restoration on private land, linking existing fragmented koala habitats and koala colonies.
• We are also working with One Tree Planted on an ecological restoration project in Southwest Western Australia. This project will re-establish species of rich native vegetation that will capture carbon and extend important wildlife corridors in a biodiversity hotspot. 
• Becoming a founding sponsor of UpLink, a World Economic Forum initiative that connects more than 50,000 ecopreneurs globally so they can collaborate and solve the climate crisis. One local venture we’re backing is Loam Bio, an Australian startup based in Orange, NSW. The start-up is developing technology to help plants store more carbon in the soil.

Accelerate customer success and the nature positive movement

We’re already partnering with Trailblazers ready to lead the charge for a more sustainable future — whether through helping our suppliers set their own emissions-reduction goals, developing a Net Zero Marketplace or delivering a sustainability management solution for businesses like the South Australian Government. 

We plan to build on these existing achievements by empowering our Trailblazer community to identify, manage, and report on their nature-related risks, impacts, and dependencies. Watch this space! 

Driving collective impact together

We believe that our nature strategy is a great starting point to drive collective impact and reverse nature loss. 

So as we celebrate Earth Day today, this is our call to action for companies big and small — now is the time to rethink your sustainability strategies and take meaningful actions for a nature positive future.