In honor of Earth Month and the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report urging accelerated progress toward net-zero emissions, Microsoft is excited to unveil significant updates to Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. These enhancements offer improved insights, including Scope 3 waste data, as well as better data access, management, reporting, and customization capabilities to support organizations in achieving their sustainability goals more rapidly.
Complete insights with customized dimensions
Organizations can now incorporate custom dimensions (Preview) into data model entities within Microsoft Sustainability Manager, enhancing their calculations and analysis. For instance, they can link activity or emissions data with additional contextual information, such as emissions intensity per employee.
After integrating, mapping, and calculating data with custom dimensions, it can be used to generate manufacturing intensities by domain. For example, the dashboard shown below illustrates emissions from laptop manufacturing segmented by assembly line, model, and SKU.
Drive momentum with data approval management
Particularly beneficial for established organizations with robust data management workflows, data approval management (Preview) allows data to be staged in a pending state, ensuring it is stored without affecting calculations, analysis, or reporting. Once reviewed and approved by authorized users, the data is then made available for all related functions.
Easily access emissions data based on Microsoft 365 usage
Organizations can now obtain Microsoft datacenter emissions data related to their usage of Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online, Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, through the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability API (Preview). This API utilizes a third-party–validated emissions calculation methodology to determine all three emissions scopes as outlined by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Microsoft 365 administrators can grant access across the organization with role-based permissions, allowing teams to analyze emissions data by scope, month, year, and region.
Additionally, organizations can configure access to their Azure usage-based emissions data via the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability API portal, accessible through the Microsoft Cloud Solution Center.
Stay ahead of disclosure preparation with enhanced reporting features
Given the rise in disclosure regulations, a particularly valuable feature of Sustainability Manager is its report customization capability, which allows for the inclusion of essential sustainability information in any required disclosure format.
Organizations can now create reports incorporating various types of sustainability data—such as emissions data along with Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 activity data. This significantly reduces the number of reports needed and streamlines the disclosure preparation process.
Specify reporting period details by naming the reporting year, setting the report's starting date, and choosing a template to determine the number of periods to be created. After the report is generated, the reporting year will be selectable on the insights pages.
Improve data control by altering the status of a period from the default “open” to “closed,” which helps prevent modifications during an audit or after a disclosure.
Create custom views for analyzing emissions
The allocations dashboard (Preview) enables organizations to monitor emissions based on headcount, area, production type, or any other custom criteria they define. This feature allows organizations to evaluate the impact of various internal metrics on their overall emissions across the business.
Improve understanding of Scope 2 market- and location-based emissions
Users can enhance the accounting of their Scope 2 emissions with a new calculation methodology that combines location-based and market-based emissions data. This new model (in preview) allows for simultaneous tracking and reporting of both types of Scope 2 emissions for the same activity.
Expedite ingestion of Scope 2 energy activity data
Data Capture (Preview) allows organizations to use AI Builder to process purchased energy invoices. This feature involves training a custom optical character recognition model to extract key attributes from the invoices and to identify different energy providers based on invoice collections.
Once trained, the model can be utilized within Microsoft Sustainability Manager to effortlessly upload and process additional invoices, which are then incorporated as Scope 2 activity data.
Ingest a variety of data from multiple sources through a guided process
With enhanced capabilities for data processing, mapping, and transformation, users can now import deconstructed data from single or multiple sources more efficiently. These improvements help reduce onboarding time and accelerate progress toward sustainability goals.
Data can be imported into Sustainability Manager using various methods tailored to data type, source, user expertise, and import frequency. The new guided data import experience includes options such as Excel templates, a Power Query flow, and partner solutions, allowing users to choose the most suitable approach.
Users can achieve greater flexibility and control over data transformations by setting up a single import. They can add entities during the import setup and access detailed guidance to ensure successful integration. Data transformation and model attribute mapping can be performed together or as separate steps, accommodating different user roles and simplifying management.
Accelerate environmental credit processes with Environmental Credit Service (Preview)
New features in the Environmental Credit Service (Preview) aim to enhance transparency and scalability in environmental market ecosystems by leveraging a unified infrastructure and standardized data.
Identity Handling (Preview) allows participants in the voluntary environmental market—such as project suppliers, buyers, and marketplaces—to use their existing identities to interact seamlessly with others through the Environmental Credit Service. The service supports multi-party workflows while allowing participants to authenticate and authorize their identities.
Creation and Management of Processed Claims (Preview), accessible via the Environmental Credit Service API, standardizes and streamlines the validation of environmental claims. This feature facilitates faster screening and approval of claims by issuing registries, which are typically managed by validation and verification bodies.
Role-Based Access Control (Preview), integrated into the service and user interface, enables admins to manage access rights within their organization. Admins can grant, modify, or revoke access, oversee asset access across organizations, and set permissions for collaboration. For instance, if a credit supplier has pre-allocated credits to a specific buyer and wishes to restrict visibility to other buyers, they can limit access to the designated buyer only.
Promote waste reduction with the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability waste data model (Preview)
The new waste data model (Preview), built on the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability framework, facilitates the storage and access of waste sustainability data. It is designed to support sustainability initiatives by incorporating waste quantity and quality measurements linked with sustainability reference data.
This model offers users a comprehensive view of waste metrics, including quantity by type, source, and category across various company facilities. It also allows for monitoring the quality of waste disposal. These insights support efforts toward waste reduction and the development of a circular economy.
The waste sustainability data model can be deployed in the Dataverse environment via the Microsoft Cloud Solution Center.
In March 2023, Microsoft introduced the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability water data model (Preview), which supports efficient calculation, visualization, analysis, and reporting of water sustainability data. This model provides a unified view of water sustainability, aiding organizations in meeting both mandatory and voluntary reporting requirements through custom configurations, monitoring, and reporting.
Next Steps
Advance your organization’s sustainability efforts by setting up and configuring Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.
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