Sherif Tawfik

Chief Sustainability Officer, Middle East & Africa, Microsoft

HOW ARE YOU CREATING A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE FOR THE REGION?

Microsoft has been working to become more sustainable for more than a decade. We’ve committed to being carbon negative by 2030 and removing all the carbon we have emitted into the environment since our founding by 2050. We’ve also committed to being water positive by 2030, to having zero waste by 2030, and to protecting ecosystems by developing a Planetary Computer. We’re taking our experiences from the last ten years and using them to help our customers and partners achieve their own goals and address key sustainability challenges. We think about the different roles that we play as a customer, supplier, investor, employer, policy advocate, and partner in innovation to customers, organisations, and institutions around the world.

The MENA region is especially vulnerable to climate change. It is one of the world’s most water-scarce and dry regions; with a high dependency on climate-sensitive agriculture and a large share of its population and economic activity in flood-prone urban coastal zones. In turn, due to the substantial risk that the region faces, we are taking a proactive approach to incorporate sustainability in every dialogue we have with our wider range of customers, partners and suppliers. Although nations’ commitment will ultimately determine effective adaptation to climate change, Microsoft wants to have a crucial role in mainstreaming sustainability measures in MEA’s journey towards a net zero economy.

Ultimately, a sustainable future relies on the intersection between technology and science, this is so we can better understand what’s happening and respond with tools to better manage our environmental resources, mitigate risk, and transform our organisations. For this reason, we are working towards embedding sustainability in industries and governments through their organization and value chain with integrated multi-industry solutions available through our Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability platform and partner ecosystem.

WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES YOU FACE?

Scope 3 emissions, or the indirect value chain emissions, pose the greatest challenge to Microsoft today. To truly make progress towards our own sustainability commitments, organisations that contribute towards our scope 3 emissions must figure out how to recognize their complete environmental footprint—across their entire enterprise and value chain—including Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions. The problem is that most organisations don’t currently have access to the data they need to do this. Without data, they can’t know the full extent of their carbon footprint, and they won’t know how to fix it. It’s fundamentally important that we come together to solve the data problem at the root of Scope 3 emissions measurement.

HOW ARE YOU OVERCOMING SAID CHALLENGES?

Our experience has taught us that we must prioritize organizational and digital transformation to see long-lasting change. Sustainability has become an integral part of Microsoft’s operations rather than just something we do. Better data organization and re-alignment of our company’s vision and strategy with our sustainability objectives served as the foundation for our initial effort. However, we also learned that the road to net zero is not linear, and until we fulfill our promise to become carbon negative by 2030, we must continuously enhance our efforts to decouple our emissions from our growth.