2025 is a notable year in the world’s continued efforts toward a more sustainable future. It marks the five-year countdown to 2030, the end of the timeline for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 2025 will also be the 30th convening of the UN Climate Change Conference—also known as COP30—and it is taking place in Brazil, both a symbolically and strategically important nation in the world’s fight against climate change and environmental degradation.
It is also a notable year for Microsoft. In addition to celebrating the 50th anniversary of our company’s founding, it is the midpoint of our own sustainability journey. In 2020 we announced our ambitions to be carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste by 2030, all while protecting ecosystems. We have made tremendous progress over the past five years, and we are proud of what we’ve accomplished. We’ve also learned lessons along the way, lessons that constantly inform and shape our path toward 2030 and beyond.
The goals that we set in 2020 reflected what we believed we needed to do in order to help push the world toward a net-zero economy. I joined Microsoft on this journey two years ago—becoming our Chief Sustainability Officer in January 2023—and I continue to be impressed by the work of employees across the company in their relentless pursuit of these goals.
In June 2020, we announced our largest power PPA to date at the time—a 500MW PPA with Sol Systems. Today, we are one of the largest carbon-free energy buyers in the world, with a 34-gigawatt (GW) contracted renewable energy portfolio across 24 countries to date. We are bringing more carbon-free electricity onto the grids where we operate, and we continue to advocate for the expansion of clean energy solutions around the world.
A key component of our water positive goal is to replenish more water than we consume across our global operations. We’ve grown our replenishment portfolio to 90 projects in over 40 locations around the world.
On our journey to become zero waste, we’re finding opportunities to keep electronics in circulation. The repairability of our current portfolio of Surface devices has evolved significantly from our first field-repairable product in 2019. This is also true of Xbox, which recently announced how they’re working to expand the number of ways players can get support to repair their consoles and accessories.
We exceeded our land protection goal, with 15,849 acres of protected land and surpassed our initial target of 11,000 acres by more than 40%.
This is only a snapshot of the real progress we’ve made over the last 5 years. We have a longstanding commitment to sustainability, and our experience shows us that the investments and innovations we’ve focused on are good for our company, our customers, the economy, and our planet. Every investment has also been a learning opportunity, a chance to test our assumptions and adjust as needed.
While we are proud of these achievements, we know that our work is far from over, and that the path ahead has gotten harder. The world is not on track to meet critical climate goals and we see many of these challenges reflected in our own journey.
In 2020, Microsoft leaders referred to our sustainability goals as a “moonshot,” and nearly five years later, we have had to acknowledge that the moon has gotten further away. However, the force creating this distance from our goals in the short term is the same one that will help us build a bigger, faster, and more powerful rocket to reach them in the long term: artificial intelligence (AI). This is not hyperbole. Already, we are seeing AI make a positive impact on the planet, and in the coming years, this technology will begin to rapidly accelerate climate solutions at a scale we’ve not yet seen. In November 2023, we introduced our AI and Sustainability Playbookwhich highlights five foundational enabling conditions needed to unlock AI’s full transformative potential for accelerating sustainability progress. In January, we shared a report that highlights our progress and the innovations that have advanced each of those five pillars.
Building the AI economy of the future is a top priority for our business, but we are also in the business of sustainability. As CSO, it is my job to ensure that these dual mandates are working together.
To achieve this, we need to run our sustainability initiatives like we run the rest of our business: ensuring that our focus is on the highest-impact interventions that truly move the needle when it comes to planetary impact.
Carbon Neutrality
Microsoft announced that it was carbon neutral in 2012, several years ahead of our ambitious goal to be carbon negative by 2030. Microsoft’s prior years achieving carbon neutrality were based on a common combination of environmental attributes purchased with funds from our corporate-wide carbon fee and our overall carbon emissions reduction efforts. This is a prime example of where we have learned and adjusted along our journey. While we continue to apply the carbon fee to investments in emissions reductions, we have ceased purchasing non-additional, unbundled renewable energy certificates. We are refocusing the use of these funds on more long-term, higher-impact investments across carbon reduction, carbon removal, and clean electricity procurement. These interventions are expected to more effectively help us achieve our goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030 and may take us out of carbon-neutral position.
We will also continue to invest in innovative climate solutions through our $1B Climate Innovation Fund (CIF). Since launching the CIF in 2020, Microsoft has committed nearly $800M to solutions ranging from sustainable fuels and low-carbon building materials to carbon dioxide removal, water innovation, and circular economy technologies. We now have a portfolio of 63 investees that we’re helping to scale. Going forward, we will extend this strategy and continue to invest our capital to build new markets and increase the market supply of emerging sustainable technologies to address carbon, water, and waste.
We are proud to continue making decisions that drive positive environmental impact in the market and deliver high-integrity investments. We remain resolute in our commitment to our climate goals and to empowering others with the technology needed to build a more sustainable future.
In my first year with Microsoft, I wrote a piece on LinkedIn: Removing Roadblocks in the Race to Net Zerowhere I compared reaching our sustainability goals to training for a marathon, noting that “it will take focus, planning, and perseverance to reach the finish line.” Today—and now two years into my role—I would like to add another comparison, to an African proverb that says the following: “If you want to travel fast, travel alone; if you want to travel far, travel together.”
In 2025, the moon is further away, so we all must travel together and do more if we are going to reach it. We will continue to work in close collaboration with our employees, customers, suppliers, industry peers, partners, and with policymakers to maximize our impact in pursuit of our shared goals.
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