A platform for change

It has already been one year! In May 2022, I wrote about my reasons for joining Salesforce. Today, I would like to share a few insights and experiences from my journey in the private sector and the urgent global transformation our societies and economy need to make in order to reach collective climate goals.?

It’s all about coordination

In my career over the past 23 years, I have worked for an NGO (IUCN ), a Government (Denmark), the European Commission, the United Nations (UNEP ), and now for Salesforce, a Fortune 500 global company . There is a vast difference in perspectives between the different sectors. More public-private partnerships are starting to emerge, which is encouraging, and companies engage more with civil society. Some even advocate transparently for strong public policies, like we do at Salesforce with our climate and nature policy priorities . But there's still a tendency to point fingers and play the blame game between civil society, governments, and the private sector when it comes to our failure on climate and nature action. Like in a football match, the question is not whether one individual player will win or lose the game. The success of our global civilization depends on each and every one of us playing our role: governments must send clear market signals, citizens must demand better products and services, and the private sector needs to invest in the rapid and deep transformation of all economic sectors. Only by working together can we achieve a sustainable future for ourselves and the planet. It is in fact a triple transformation that we are going to see this decade: deep decarbonization, a move to circularity, and a move from resource extraction to a regenerative economy, including planetary-scale restoration of our critical natural infrastructure . Those necessary transformations are now beginning, and they must be accelerated. Let’s all start with the role our organizations can play, within global and national policy frameworks and markets. The private sector controls two thirds of the world’s economy, and drives a large part of innovation and transformation; businesses must play a central role in the ‘sustainability revolution ’ that is now underway.?

Greenwashing? No thanks!?

Is there greenwashing in the private sector? Plenty, unfortunately. A recent Google Cloud study confirmed that almost 60% of executives believe their companies are overstating their sustainability initiatives. But change is coming. With better measurement and vast improvements in disclosure requirements, it will become much clearer which companies are really walking the talk.?

Salesforce advocates for full climate and nature footprint disclosure, for example we joined other companies calling for the new Global Biodiversity Framework’s target 15 , which states large companies should disclose their nature footprint. In the EU, about 50,000 companies will have to start disclosing their ESG performance in coming years, starting with about 11,700 largest companies already from 1 January 2024. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive will level the global sustainability playing field. It requires disclosures across a broad framework of ESG indicators. Salesforce has developed a solution to help companies accelerate their sustainability goals . Once all listed companies publish their corporate footprints, it will be easier to track performance, which in turn will give sustainability a higher priority within each company. And peer pressure through supply chain action will multiply quickly, as large companies demand from their suppliers to take sustainability action, like we do with our Sustainability Exhibit .?

Carbon credits - a ‘last but not later’ part of corporate climate action

We fully adhere to the mitigation hierarchy of focusing first on emission reductions. For Salesforce (as for more and more companies), buying high quality carbon credits to compensate for residual emissions is a ‘last, but not later’ investment in an overall climate action plan. My colleague Max Scher and I described the Salesforce perspective on the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) last October, and we pointed out four key needs for improvement: increase integrity, increase quality, increase supply, and reduce complexity. We have seen a lot of progress across these needed areas of improvement just over the past six months. At the same time, we have to remember that the VCM only exists because it fills a massive policy void. There is no global tax or sufficient other price on carbon, and that is unlikely to change any time soon. In the meantime, we need the VCM as a tool to effectively introduce an internal price on carbon for large companies, and channel much needed investments into climate & nature action right now, urgently, and not just in a few years’ time, or when the VCM has been perfected after years of tinkering. Financial markets have undergone over 100 years of development, and yet they are still not perfect.? Instead of focusing only on the downsides of the VCM, we should lead and be courageous enough to increase our investments in it, including in nature-based solutions that produce multiple benefits beyond carbon . Inaction is now one of the biggest risks, and we cannot afford to wait for regulation before taking urgent action. Let us use the VCM to channel much-needed investments into climate and nature action right now, while continuously pushing for its improvement.

Competition vs. collaboration?

My final reflection is about the perception that the private sector is all about competition. While that is certainly true for product and pricing, there is also a lot of collaboration around finding sustainable solutions, and sharing best practice. For example in the Business Alliance for Scaling Climate Solutions , we run boot camps and knowledge sessions for essential carbon market challenges. And in the corporate alliance of the trillion tree initiative, 1t.org , we work with more than 80 other companies to share and improve our investments into forest ecosystem conservation and forest ecosystem restoration. The global forest movement has matured over the past years, and knowledge and action platforms like 1t.org are essential to give private sector investors the know-how and confidence to invest in the right solutions, with long-term benefits for nature, climate and people. Through corporate initiatives like Business for Nature , we can make our corporate voice heard more clearly in support of change. At Salesforce, we gladly share our lessons learned on climate and nature action with our more than 150,000 customers. We see this as a way to increase customer success, in line with our core values , and to vastly amplify our own impact. And while many of our large customers have their own excellent sustainability teams and solutions, we also support many small and medium-sized businesses, and about 50,000 NGOs, with the right tools to get ready for the sustainability transformation. Digital tools can help to navigate and accelerate the sustainability journey , and at Salesforce, we will continue to improve our solutions. In my experience over the past 12 months, our role as Salesforce is to be a powerful platform for change. We are a forward player on the football pitch, and we want to play our part for the growing global team effort called sustainability. That will only work if we all keep our eyes on the ball, and on the goal: a just transition to a net zero, nature positive world.?