Will tech giants begin launching carbon dioxide removal technologies every two years? It was only two years ago, in April 2022, when Frontier Climate was launched as an initiative by Stripe, Alphabet (Google), Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey Sustainability to secure over $1 billion in commitments by 2030 to drive the demand for high-quality, permanent carbon removal solutions.
On May 22, 2024, Meta, Salesforce, Google, and Microsoft launched a nature-based carbon removal coalition to purchase up to 20 million tons of high-quality credits by 2030. This ambitious pledge and coalition, named the ‘Symbiosis Coalition,’ marks a collaborative effort among some of the world’s leading technology companies to invest in sustainable and impactful environmental solutions.
Goals and Standards of the Coalition
The coalition aims to establish rigorous standards for carbon removal projects, ensuring they provide reliable and measurable benefits to the environment. By setting these high standards, the coalition hopes to address the urgent need for effective climate action and encourage other organizations to follow suit.
Enhancing Climate Impact Certainty
One of the main goals of the initiative is to enhance the certainty of climate impact. By investing in high-quality nature-based solutions, the coalition seeks to ensure that carbon removal projects deliver the expected environmental benefits. Therefore, Symbiosis is eager to engage with a wide array of participants in the restoration and carbon markets—including investors, NGOs, standards organizations, project developers, researchers, and other key players—to establish a robust carbon market that prioritizes natural solutions.
Criteria for Nature-Based Carbon Removal Credits
Symbiosis aims to procure nature-based carbon removal credits based on precise accounting, longevity, social benefits, ecological integrity, and transparency. It will focus on forest and mangrove restoration, using criteria for additionality, leakage prevention, and durable projects, benefiting Indigenous communities.
Melanie Nakagawa, Chief Sustainability Officer at Microsoft, stated, “High-quality, nature-based solutions are vital to addressing climate change, and our work with the Symbiosis Coalition is a key step towards realizing our carbon negative goal by 2030 through a diversified portfolio of carbon removal. This collaboration will help build the overall market for these solutions, leading to more restoration purchases that benefit all of us. Continued investment in carbon removal is important not just to meet our goals but for the world to meet its goals.”
Significant and Quick Action is Needed
It will take between $6 trillion and $16 trillion in total investments to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by the year 2050, according to a recent McKinsey research. A large financial gap for ecosystem protection and restoration is evident from the fact that less than $15 billion has been spent on carbon removal initiatives to far. For this investment gap to be closed, significant and quick action is needed. See also (Chart 1).
The news is timely for Microsoft, as its 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report notes a 30.9% rise in indirect emissions (Scope 3) from its 2020 baseline. In aggregate, across all Scopes 1–3, Microsoft’s emissions are up 29.1% from the 2020 baseline. See also (Chart 2).
A major reason for the rise in Microsoft’s indirect emissions (Scope 3), as noted in its report, is the construction of more data centers and the associated embodied carbon in building materials, as well as hardware components such as semiconductors, servers, and racks. The challenges are partly unique to Microsoft’s position as a leading cloud supplier expanding its data centers. However, these challenges also reflect broader issues the world must overcome to develop and use greener concrete, steel, fuels, and chips. These are the biggest drivers of our Scope 3 challenges.
The Future of Carbon Removal Technologies
Will tech giants need more carbon dioxide technologies or nuclear energy to manage the growing emissions associated with their operations? A 2020 survey of data center managers and IT experts claims that, on average, the lifespan of their data center servers is 2-3 years. However, same survey two years later, claims servers are even running longer (3-5 years) depending on how often it’s used i.e. cooling systems implemented, regular upkeep, and the specific GPU model.
Therefore, we might see press releases about new carbon dioxide removal technologies every two to three years or three to five years to offset the growing depreciation of data centers.
