ExchangeWire’s Post

Google Is No Longer Claiming to Be Carbon Neutral... 🤯 🤯 How to track whether your company is really concern on their environmental impact ? is it enough to offset CO2 emissions by buying "credits" ? While no company/sector/situation may be equal.. one of the challenging indicators to watch for is the commit/deadline to become 24x7 CO2 neutral - no CO2 emissions any hour, any day, within the year... And Alphabet Inc. / Google in their recent #ESGreport keep it's promise to do so by 2030 (and we are not "so far" from that day)... Details on the relevance of this commitment 👇 https://lnkd.in/dBhYReZV

Demand is outpacing data centre capacity, as the Financial Times reported - What does this mean for the technology sector and our society?   The data centre dilemma isn't new but its importance becomes increasingly critical. With the AI boom and our overreliance as a society in the cloud, DC providers and governments need to take action quickly to enforce green targets and regulations - to ensure the environmental trade-offs are minimised.   Businesses that overspend in the cloud contribute to these issues when they could and should focus on optimising their infrastructure. And that doesn't mean they must compromise on their ability to scale or, indeed, on their performance – they can save costs, reduce their carbon footprint and continue to perform.   I am more than happy to chat this further if you have any questions! - Drop a comment or send me a message.   https://lnkd.in/e-E_Q3Qu

There are 3 key components required to drive positive change and create a more sustainable future. 1. Mindset 2. Education and learning 3. Action Different people and businesses with different capabilities can create change. Take a read of Google’s 2023 Environmental Report to see how their efforts to provide information and support learning and education through their tools is forming part of the jigsaw of sustainability solutions success. With my retail hat on, I see the power that this information has to support shoppers to make the right purchase choices, informed purchase choices learning more about how to buy better. Thanks for sharing Kate Brandt. #retailtechnology #retail #tri

In a week it is time to demand a fair & neutral online search. This will hopefully be a new era for everyone that has for a long time been demoted by different search engines. Among the DMA’s many important obligations, the ban of self-preferencing lies at the heart of its potential. Please sign if your company want to be part of this movement and to rewrite the future for fair and neutral online search. neutralsearch.eu

Earlier this week, Google published its detailed 100+ page 2023 Environment Report. Windō has broken it down to succinctly highlight their priorities, achievements, goals and Scope 1 and 2 emissions (more to follow on Scope 3 and more in due course)... https://bit.ly/Goog22 #enviornment #reporting #youngtalent #accessibility #sustainabilityreport

I'm excited to announce a few enhancements to the Scope3 emissions model that increase accuracy, improve compliance with the SRI framework, and lay groundwork for the upcoming GARM standards. More important than the specific changes is that as sustainability measurement becomes a standard metric for every campaign, we need to make sure that we are transparent about how the numbers and calculations change over time, especially since they will be incorporated into corporate sustainability reports and part of regulatory filings. These changes were proposed and accepted into an open source repository before flowing downstream to the Scope3 model, and we expect that with the GARM standards we will adopt a similar process where we (and other sustainability measurement providers) incorporate changes as they are approved through some governance process. Based on the excellent work of SRI - LES REGIES INTERNET we are updating the Scope3 emissions model to incorporate embodied emissions for network data transfer. We are also changing our assumptions for streaming bandwidth to align with published data from YouTube and other platforms. We also use a blend of mobile and fixed network as the default instead of choosing one or the other (unlike SRI which uses data from France, we use a country-specific database as networks differ greatly even across Europe, and especially in countries that skipped straight to mobile). We also added an ad server node to our ad stack model for all digital channels. We previously returned 0g as the ad selection emissions for properties that are direct sold; now we model proprietary and third-party ad servers. This increases modeled emissions slightly as you would expect. https://lnkd.in/eTXhcYJs

Environmental Credit Service (preview) Carbon credit enthusiasts, take note. More and higher-quality environmental assets are soon to hit the market. Discover the Environmental Credit Service (preview), a Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solution, that can help partners and customers automate, simplify and secure the credit origination process. #microsoftadvocate #microsoftpartners

Small individual improvements, applied at scale, can drive significant global improvements. This is particularly relevant for the climate crisis, where for the last two centuries, and especially the last fifty years, we've been engaged in the exact opposite. There are many examples of this kind of massive-impact scaling (declaration of interest/bias: what follows are all pro-Google examples): from the slightly silly: shaving 1 ms off the download time for fonts on Android phones, through better compression algorithms, nominally adds up to many human lifetimes being saved per annum in cumulative waiting time ... though no one individual would ever notice the difference (e.g. https://lnkd.in/e3uFDreH, 1 ms saved 10 times per day across 4 billion mobile devices = 6.5 lots of 70 years per annum) to business fundamentals: people clicking on online ads trigger payments from a few rappen to a few francs, which cumulatively provide the large majority of more than a quarter of a trillion dollars of revenue for Google each year (c.f. https://lnkd.in/esUvjFzb) while also enabling vastly more than that in wider economic activity (e.g. for the USA https://lnkd.in/euQE8erd or Europe https://lnkd.in/e8nF-_Ay ) But what really matters are things like cumulatively shifting our species' impact on the environment. A host of activities centred on genuinely addressing climate challenges for a business is one thing, and vastly better than just talking about doing something in future. Better still is to do that while also enabling the organisation's user base, in this case billions of people and tens of millions of businesses, to make small but positive changes, often without even realising. I realise elimination is better than reduction, that carbon reduction matching schemes aren't as good as being fully carbon-free, and that environmental impact is about much more than just carbon. Nonetheless, as an employee I was able to piggy-back on Google's corporate efforts to approximately balance out our family's historical lifetime carbon footprint, including the impact of constructing all three of my family homes from childhood to now (built in the 1950s, 1870s and 1980s respectively, with an extension in the 2010s). But that's nothing compared to the gigaton ambitions for Google's product suite. This is what real impact looks like for a business that cares about its impact on the world (it's worth clicking through to the full Google 2023 environmental impact report): https://lnkd.in/eaTHfVGR

What is interoperability and why is it important?