Net Zero: Analyzing and Managing our Environmental Impact | Salesforce

At Salesforce, we're committed to helping create a low carbon, sustainable future for all. This commitment is grounded in our core values. Being transparent about our environmental impact and our progress toward our sustainability goals is vital to our success and builds trust with our key stakeholders. But we need robust and accurate data to be able to do that. That's why we created a sustainability app that streamlines our data collection, enables analysis and simplifies reporting. Let's take a look. Our main dashboard shows us an overview of our key metrics. Salesforce has offices in more than 80 cities, so we need to know how each of our buildings is doing. If we drill into one of our marquee buildings, we can find out key information like the size of the office, if it's been green building certified, and other data that helps us understand the office's performance. Calculating our emissions is easy. We just enter the monthly energy consumption from our utility bill. The app automatically calculates the monthly carbon footprint of the building. Not only is the info available immediately, it can also be easily verified. An auditor can see email history, compare the data in the system to the real data sources like invoices, and if they have a question, they can just assign a task within the app streamlining all of our data conversations. The app not only makes our environmental data more robust, but also more intelligent. Our personal data scientist Einstein lets us see into the future. He quickly reviews data like occupancy, historical electricity use and weather to predict what our monthly footprint will be. If there are any major differences between actual energy use and what Einstein predicted, he immediately provides a recommendation so we can improve efficiency. These predictions allow us to identify issues early and them all within the app. Not only are we powering our sustainability programs with more intelligent, auditable data, we're able to use this to inform our environmental strategy. High quality data has allowed us to take the necessary steps to offer our customers a carbon neutral cloud and achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. We also use Einstein analytics to see meaningful metrics related to water use. Let's take a look at our water footprint and risk dashboard for fiscal year 18. This interactive dashboard gives us a comprehensive overview of our water consumption at Salesforce facilities around the world. For more details, we can simply ask Einstein. Einstein also helps us manage water risk. He shows us which cities are likely to experience water risk, like drought and shortages both now and in the future. Only 5% of our facilities are categorized as high water risk and fortunately, Einstein tells us the water consumed in those cities only accounts for 3% of our total water consumption. So this isn't so alarming. But let's take a look into the future. Even in an optimistic scenario, over half of our facilities will be facing high or extremely high water stress in 2020. Therefore we know we need to start planning for the future and take action now. Lets take San Francisco, our global headquarters in an area prone to drought as an example. Our current water risk is medium but Future risk in 2020 is very high. We've been able to use this knowledge to drive action. In January 2018 we announced that we will be installing a black water recycling system in Salesforce Tower which will save more than 7 million gallons of water annually. Equipping our Salesforce Tower with the state of the art water recycling system demonstrates how companies can harness sustainable innovation to drive positive environmental impact. We are excited to be able to use predictive technology to help us manage our environmental risks and opportunities. If you're interested in learning more about Salesforce sustainability programs, visit salesforce.com sustainability.