Discover how Google Cloud plans to help businesses exceed their targets.
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Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) has climbed the priority ladder of organizations. Increasingly, candidates want to be aligned with a business’ priorities and positively impacting the environment is an agreeable cause.
On top of that, most organizations would undoubtedly like to have a positive environmental impact.
Contextualizing the current climate of environmental responsibility at the first Sustainability Summit, Jenn Bennett, technical director for sustainability at Google Cloud, said: “If I look at a lot of the things that are going on across Google, you may see something like sustainability as a whole.
“It can involve your food. It’s in your cafeterias. It’s your energy within your data centers. It’s your supply chain and all of your Scope 3 emissions [emissions from third parties], and yet all these things actually interlink together as a complex ecosystem.”
With this scope of ESG focus in mind, Google Cloud has unveiled a myriad of solutions at the summit.
Google Cloud’s ESG solutions
Google has revealed a new version of Google Earth Engine that is made for enterprise customers. This technology intends to give companies real-time insight into their environmental footprint.
Rebecca Moore, director of Google Earth, Earth Engine, and Outreach, commented: “Google Earth Engine, which we originally launched to scientists and NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) in 2010, is at the forefront of planetary-scale environmental monitoring, with one of the world’s largest publicly available Earth observation data catalogs.”
To do this, the program “combines data from hundreds of satellites and other sources that are continuously streaming into Earth Engine”.
Moore continued: “This data is then combined with massive geospatial cloud computing resources, which enables the transformation of this raw data into timely, accurate, high resolution, decision-relevant insights about the state of the world.”
This includes information on ecosystems and agriculture and how they are changing.
With this program, Google Cloud wants to empower enterprises to be responsible with resources and build better sustainable practices.
To further best practices in the ESG space, Google Cloud also has the Carbon Sense Suite. This product was introduced last year but now encompasses direct greenhouse emissions and Scope Three emissions and will be adding Scope Two shortly.
Alongside this, is the option for a ‘Low Carbon Mode’ which limits Google Cloud use in order to lower the emissions of data centers.
Carbon emission tracking extends beyond the cloud and Google will be using an integrated access model to track emissions from other sources.
Google Cloud hopes this will enable companies to begin cutting emissions and keep track of their progress.
There are evidently plenty of tools to start this journey, and Google Cloud plans to develop more. The only thing left to do is to start reducing your carbon footprint.
