Here is today’s sustainability news, research and analysis for technology partners, renewable energy consultants and green IT service providers. Today's sustainability news also involves management consultants, CIOs, chief sustainability officers (CSOs), c-suite members and climate accounting professionals.
A. Sustainable Technology, Talent, Partnerships and Green IT Alliances
1. Research - Sustainability Challenges: Roughly 40% of North American procurement leaders are still ignoring sustainability, Sedex research found. A separate survey finds that only 16.7% of IT professionals consider sustainability a top issue, and only 38.7% consider it a priority at all, according to The Register.
2. Controversy - Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi): The Science Based Targets initiative is at the center of a fierce debate over carbon offsets that will have major implications for corporate climate action, Bloomberg reports.
3. Partnership - IT Consulting and Cloud Services: TechConnect, a data management consultancy, is creating and deploying a sustainability software platform for the Port of Brisbane (PBPL), Australia. The platform runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
3. Partnership - IT Consulting and Cloud Services:Â IFS and PwC are partnering to build and offer a cloud-based Sustainability Management Solution. The solution will help IFS customers to "navigate the new requirements of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and other emerging mainstream global regulatory standards that our customers are facing," the companies said.
4. Partnership - ESG Consulting: Crowe Poland and Envirly are partnering to help customers achieve their ESG goals, the companies said.
5. IT Consulting - AI Software Rollout: PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) will become the largest customer and first reseller of OpenAI’s enterprise product, The Wall Street Journal reported. PwC said it would roll out ChatGPT Enterprise, the version of ChatGPT aimed at large companies, to its 75,000 U.S. employees and 26,000 U.K. employees, totaling over 100,000 licenses for the artificial intelligence product, the Journal said.
6. AI and Chromebooks: Google rolled out an array of new artificial intelligence and gaming features to its Chromebook Plus models, SeekingAlpha reported.
7. Agriculture - Scope 3 and Carbon Accounting: CIBO Technologies unveiled an end-to-end Scope 3 offering designed to help agricultural enterprises "identify, measure, reduce and report on carbon emissions throughout their supply chains," the company said.
8. City Planning - Digital Twins Market Growth Forecast: More than 500 cities could be using some form of digital twin technology by 2025, according to ABI Research, Reuters said. By using digital twins to design, plan and manage connected infrastructure, cities could save $280 billion by 2030, it says.
9. Layoffs - Renewable Energy: Shell is preparing to cut staff from its offshore wind business as CEO Wael Sawan moves the company away from the capital-intensive renewable energy sector, Bloomberg reported.
B. Sustainability M&A, Investments, Funding and Green IT Business Launches
1. Funding - Call for Startups: E8 Angels, which positions itself as the largest cleantech angel investing community in the United States, has released an annual request for proposals for Decarbon8-US, its philanthropic impact fund. The fund is focused on renewable energy startups.
2. Funding - Carbon Credits Exchange: Aramco Ventures is investing in Xpansiv, which runs "the largest spot exchange for environmental commodities, including carbon credits and renewable energy certificates." Funding figures were not disclosed.
3. Funding - Construction and Carbon Reduction: Vizcab, a French SaaS platform specializing in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to reduce the carbon footprint of construction projects, has secured an additional €4.5 million in Series A funding, ProTechBuzz reported. This brings the total funding for the round to €9 million, the report said.
4. M&A - Renewable Energy Infrastructure: Energy Capital Partners and co-investors is acquiring Atlantica Sustainable Infrastructure for an equity value of approximately $2.555 billion. Atlantica's revenue was $242.5 million in Q1 of 2024, up about $400,000 from Q1 of 2023. Net loss was $5.4 million, compared to an $11 million net loss in Q1 of 2023. Atlantica has renewable energy assets across the United States, South America and Europe.
5. M&A - Data Center Rumor: KKR and Singtel may acquire a $1 billion stake in one of Asia's biggest data centre providers, Reuters reported. The target company is ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC), the report said.
6. Complete M&A List: Here's our database of all M&A deals involving green IT and renewable energy buyers, sellers and investors.
C. Regional and Global Sustainability Policies and News
1. European Regulations - Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA): Governments have signed off on new legislation they hope will prevent the EU from falling behind the US and China in the race to corner the market for clean energy technology, and finally see carbon capture and storage (CCS) deployed at scale after decades of false starts, Euronews.green reported. The legislation, known as the Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA), dovetails with the new Critical Raw Materials Act intended to secure access to elements like lithium and rare earths, the report said.
2. United States - Electric School Busses: The White House unveiled nearly $900 million in awards to 530 school districts to replace thousands of aging, gas-fueled school buses with cleaner, mainly electric models, Reuters reported.
3. United States - Chief Sustainability Officers: Roughly 180 public companies in the U.S. employ CSOs, up from 29 in 2011, recruiter Weinreb Group reports. Roughly 75% of those CSOs sit on the company’s leadership team while just over one-third report directly to the CEO, The Wall Street Journal reported.
4. Germany - Chief Sustainability Officers: Roughly 90% of companies had a dedicated CSO role in 2022, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, with 58% of those listed on the DAX exchange having women sustainability chiefs, The Wall Street Journal reported.
5. Germany - Hydrogen Projects: Germany will fast-track permits for hydrogen projects and end a ban on carbon capture and storage as the nation tries to clean-up its fossil-fuel intensive industry, Bloomberg reported.
6. Japan - Nuclear Energy Policy: Japan had big plans for nuclear power before the 2011 tsunami, Bloomberg reported. Now a debate over restarting Japan's biggest nuclear facility will test if it can turn away from costly imported fuels, the report said.
D. Sustainability and Green Technology Conference Calendar
- Cisco Live 2024Â (June 2-6, Las Vegas, Nevada)
- ClimaTech 2024Â (June 3-6, Boston, Massachusetts)
- Computex 2024Â (June 3-7, Taipei, Taiwan)
- SAP Sapphire 2024Â (June 3-5, Orlando, Florida)
- Siemens Realize Live Europe 2024Â (June 3-5, Munich, Germany)
- Complete Calendar of Sustainability Conferences
E. Previous Updates & Future News
- Did You Miss Yesterday's Daily Update?: Here is our previous sustainability, green IT and renewable energy news for technology partners.
- Future Updates: If you have news to share then please email me the details.
