Plan and prepare for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability in 2023 release wave 1

Overview

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability empowers organizations to accelerate sustainability progress by bringing together a growing set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities from Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and solutions from a global ecosystem of partners.

We've continued to build out our offerings to unify data with an increasingly automated and comprehensive view into the emissions impact of your entire operations and value chain. We're also offering an environmental credit service that allows the supply of carbon credit, reduction, and removal projects from a diverse global ecosystem of projects while adding trust and credibility. In addition, we're extending our data story with the availability of Microsoft emissions data for extensibility and customization for solutions and reporting. These offerings provide a breadth of options for organizations to continually track and report their emissions, accurately set goals to be proactive with their reduction strategies, and integrate with other business systems.

International availability of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability can be explored through the Industry Cloud availability report.

Updates to Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability 2023 release wave 1

Investment areas

Data integration and calculations
Provide a blend of data ingestion methods—from manual input or file imports to automated, direct connections to data sources—to collect data from any business, enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, or platform. Centralize this data and calculate the emissions using specialized factors and formulas.

Value chain visibility
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability helps you get a clear view of your value chain. You'll be able to digitally connect your supply chains to strengthen collaboration, accountability, transparency, and reporting. You'll gain visibility into the activities of your vendors and partners and strengthen upstream and downstream collaboration across value chains. This visibility provides transparency about product attributes and emissions activities to help you drive supply chain efficiencies, reduce emissions, and design out waste.

This release wave extends our scope 3 category calculations for the GHG Protocol. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability will provide reporting on the following scope 3 categories:

• Scope 3 category 3: Fuel- and energy-related activities not included in scope 1 or scope 2.
• Scope 3 category 12 (included in a previous release): End-of-life treatment of sold products.
• Scope 3 category 15: Investments.

System expansion and enhancement
Enhancements and expansions covered in this section include GEO expansions, API options, and more.

Reporting, disclosure, and automated insights
Leverage dashboards and analytics to accurately report and disclose emissions data for external and internal communications, annual reports, and sustainability reports. Track performance against goals and gain actionable insights.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability emissions API
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability provides APIs to access emissions data related to your Azure usage. Accurate carbon accounting requires good information from partners, vendors, and suppliers. The Cloud for Sustainability APIs give you transparency on the carbon emissions generated by your usage of Azure by providing streamlined access to historical and current Azure carbon emissions data.

Microsoft’s carbon accounting extends across all three scopes of emissions with a methodology validated by Stanford University in 2018. It uses consistent and accurate carbon accounting to quantify the effect of Microsoft cloud services on customers’ environmental footprint. You can integrate and connect this data with your sustainability dashboards and applications for business decision-making, collaboration, and analysis.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability below:

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.