Net Zero Festival: Google sets out on ‘third decade of sustainable action’
Partnerships and carbon free energy are key to Google’s decarbonisation plans, according to the tech giant’s sustainability officer Kate Brandt
Google sustainability officer Kate Brandt has outlined the tech giant’s approach to what it is describing as its third decade of sustainable action.
Speaking during BusinessGreen’s Net Zero Festival today, Brandt said the firm was “doubling down” in the decisive decade for climate action. And a cornerstone pledge to operate 24/7 on carbon free energy by 2030 was it “biggest moonshot yet,” she added.
In a chat with Aron Cramer, chief executive at sustainability organisation BSR, Brandt said Google had seen environmental concerns increasingly become core to its mission since its inception.
“At Google we’ve been at this for a long time and sustainability has been a core value dating back to our founding at 1998,” she said. “In 2007, Google was first major company to commit to carbon neutrality. In 2012, we then committed to use 100 per cent renewable energy and achieved that in 2017, and every year since.”
As governments, companies and individuals wrestle with how to combat the climate emergency, Brandt said the coming decade would see Google build partnerships to enable economies to hit net zero as soon as possible.
“Action is going to be required across the economy from large and small businesses and that is something that we’ve been thinking about,” Brandt said. “One initiative that our colleagues at Google.org have provided a grant to and been very supportive of is something called SME Climate Hub that provides tools that would be helpful to small and medium-sized businesses which may not have the privilege that we have to provide data and insights.”
She added that the company was similarly partnering to support cities.
“Cities are the tip of the speer of climate action – they represent around 70 per cent of global emissions, but they often don’t have the resources to build the same teams around climate action,” Brandt explained. “So we’ve partnered with the Global Covenant of Mayors to build a tool called the Environmental Insights Explorer that’s designed to enable cities to gain an insight into their carbon footprint or provide unique Google data sets around building emissions, transportation emissions or the solar potential of rooftops. Last year we set a really bold goal that we want to enable 500 cities to reduce a gigatonne of carbon annually.”
Brandt also used the event to discuss the company’s plan to inspire one billion climate actions via its products by the end of 2022. “One early example is that Google Maps will soon be defaulting to the least carbon intensive route for a journey that has a similar ETA,” she said.
You can still sign up to attend the Net Zero Festival and catch all the sessions on demand here.
