“Innovation runs throughout Microsoft's work towards achieving our water positive goal”
In 2020, Microsoft unveiled an ambitious initiative to achieve water positivity by 2030, aiming to replenish more water than it consumes worldwide as a key part of that goal. Furthermore, their water positive commitment is also about ensuring access to water and sanitation services for people worldwide, participating in public policy, and fostering innovation.
Microsoft's water positive commitment reflects a proactive stance to mitigate water stress and safeguard critical watersheds, wherever it operates. We had the pleasure to learn more about the company’s approach from interviewing Eliza Roberts, the Water Lead at Microsoft. Always passionate about sustainability, it was during a site visit in India that water became her central focus, after realizing that water is not just a sustainability issue but also a human health challenge, and the criticality of considering any unintended consequences of water projects. Eliza's career path has been shaped by her drive to understand how various sectors can collaboratively promote access to clean water. Now, as the Director of Microsoft’s Water Positive program, Eliza oversees initiatives aimed at achieving the company’s ambitious water positive goals. She shares the highlights of Microsoft’s journey towards becoming water positive and the company’s future plans to fund innovation and drive action on water issues.
In 2020, Microsoft announced its goal to become water positive by 2030. Can you tell us some highlights of the progress made to date?
In 2020, we set a goal to be a water positive company by 2030 and co-founded the Water Resilience Coalition (WRC), an industry-driven, CEO-led coalition of the UN Global Compact CEO Water Mandate to reduce water stress by 2050. For Microsoft, being water positive is more than reaching a positive cubic metre of water on a balance sheet. Yes, reducing water use intensity and replenishing more water than we consume is critical to reaching our water positive goal. But just as critical to our water positive vision is increasing access to clean water and sanitation services for people across the globe. We strive to get there by scaling water solutions through innovation and advocating for effective and innovative water policy. Together, these are the five pillars of our water positive goal: to reduce our water use, replenish water, increase access to clean water, scale solutions through innovation, and advocate for effective water policy.
Our water positive goal includes reducing water use, replenishment, increasing access to clean water, scaling solutions and effective water policy
As of July 2023, we have invested more than $16 million in 49 replenishment projects around the world. Together these projects are expected to provide more than 61 million m3 of volumetric water benefit (equivalent to 24,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools) over the lifetime of the projects. As of the end of FY23, we have also provided more than 1.5 million people with access to clean water and sanitation solutions, exceeding our initial 2020 target.
I’m really proud of the progress that we’ve made to date. Yet we face increasing water stress across the globe — roughly a quarter of the global population is currently experiencing water scarcity and a lack of clean drinking water. An additional 1 billion people are expected to live with extremely high water stress by 2030. There is so much more work that we all have to do to address these challenges.
What value do private firms contribute to taking action on water issues, locally and globally, and why is it important for businesses to understand water-related risks?
As water stress intensifies worldwide, it’s more important than ever for businesses to understand how water-related risks affect their business, the communities in which they operate, and local ecosystems. Most companies are already evaluating their climate risk and resilience, and water is a key part of that. And it’s not just about water scarcity — we have too much (flooding and extreme events), too little (water availability), or what we do have is too dirty (water quality). Each of these factors contribute to a company’s climate risk and sustainability profile.
There is no living thing that can function without water and similarly, no business can operate without water. Microsoft is no exception. At Microsoft, we have a responsibility to manage water impacts within our own operations — and we know we must also look beyond our four walls to help our customers and the world move toward a more sustainable future.
How does Microsoft ensure responsible water management in its operations and supply chain, particularly, concerning the water needs of data centres?
Reducing our water use is a critical component of our water positive goal. We take a holistic approach to water reduction across our campuses and datacenters to drive efficiency and reuse. As our datacenter business continues to grow, and we balance the need for power and water, Microsoft remains committed to reducing the intensity with which we withdraw resources, focusing on being as efficient as possible. Our datacenter strategy puts us on track to achieve a 40% water intensity reduction target by 2030.
It’s more important than ever for businesses to understand how water-related risks affect them, communities where they operate, and ecosystems
We continue to look for ways to increase procurement of alternative sources across our datacenters and campuses to further reduce our dependence on freshwater supply. We work to maximize the reuse of each drop of water that we withdraw, procuring reclaimed, non-potable water from utilities and from alternative sources, including rainwater, air-to-water generation, and other innovative approaches where available. In 2023 we joined the Coalition for Water Recycling to advocate for increased water reuse across the United States.
Innovation is a thread that runs throughout our work toward achieving our water positive goal, like piloting innovative approaches to reduce our water use intensity. Our datacenter team recently announced that new datacenters will be designed and optimized to support AI workloads and will consume zero water for cooling. This initiative aims to further reduce our global reliance on freshwater resources as AI computing demands increase. To learn more about our water reduction efforts, check out our most recent sustainability report.
Can you tell us about Microsoft’s water replenishment program, and to what extent does it contribute to the company’s water stewardship goals?
There is a lot of confusion around water replenishment. At a high level, water replenishment means restoring a volume of water to the local watershed and surrounding communities.
At Microsoft, our replenishment goal is to replenish more than we consume across our global operations by 2030. We focus on locations with higher water stress and where we have higher consumption. Since we are replenishing our entire global operations, we will replenish much more than we consume in those places. It’s an ambitious goal that should allow us to make a dramatic impact in these priority water basins. To guide our strategy and help ensure that our replenishment programme delivers maximum value, we established four guiding principles: 1) Prioritize investment in areas with high water stress and high operational water consumption. 2) Don’t just count drops: invest in locally relevant projects that offer co-benefits. 3) Keep community needs and impact at the forefront. 4) Focus on innovation with an aim to build project supply and scale.
We have been focused diligently over the past few years on building out our portfolio of replenishment projects, doubling it in just the last year. It spans a diverse array of water replenishment projects, from watershed restoration and land conservation to leak detection in public utilities and agricultural efficiency projects that help farmers use less water to grow crops. You can learn more about our replenishment approach and portfolio in our recent white paper, Water replenishment: Our learnings on the journey to water positive.
We’ve made rapid progress but there is still so much work to do. The most water-stressed regions tend to have fewer established projects ready for investment and implementation. It’s a critical problem and also a great opportunity to collaborate with local communities, NGOs, and businesses to build solutions from the ground up. For example, we partnered with technology company FIDO to apply its AI-enabled acoustic analysis technology to identify water leaks in London’s ageing water distribution network. Leakage is a worldwide problem with roughly 30% of water lost to leaks — staggering when you consider how precious this resource is. Since piloting this project in London, we have expanded it to two more of our high-water-stress target regions, Phoenix, Arizona, and Querétaro, Mexico.
To understand the value and impact of replenishment work, it’s critical to monitor not only individual projects but also overall basin health
One of the things I love most about the replenishment space right now is the need to think creatively about ways to build supply and scale projects to other regions. This isn’t possible without forging partnerships to implement these ideas, making the business case internally, and tracking and reporting on a project’s impact.
What are some of the challenges with monitoring and evaluating these projects?
The diversity of our replenishment projects means there is no “one size fits all” approach to evaluating impact. On-site monitoring, either using real-time or periodical sampling, is the ideal scenario but rarely feasible. Some of the leak detection projects in our portfolio use real-time data as part of their solution (FIDO, as well as some other projects we will be announcing soon), while others use on-site data to estimate water savings (Kilimo obtains irrigation data directly from farmers to calculate water use reduction), but these are exceptions. We are exploring opportunities to develop real-time water monitoring systems for projects, but more often than not, real-time measurement is cost prohibitive or, in the case of projects that involve qualitative benefits, simply not applicable. Even in cases when we are tracking volumetric benefits, we are also looking to better quantify co-benefits, such as an increase in biodiversity, greenhouse gas reduction, or access to local communities. When direct measurement is not available, the current best practice is to have a third party quantify the benefits using long-term averages and water or climate models. We take a conservative approach and use only minimum estimated volumes to help ensure that we do not overclaim.
To understand the value and impact of replenishment work, it’s critical to monitor not only individual projects but also overall basin health. At the project level, we need to start by defining key indicators to measure watershed outcomes for different types of projects. At the basin level, there is a need for public information on basin risks, basin health, and all replenishment activities underway within the basin. Only with this big picture can we understand what impact our collective efforts are having.
Looking at the coming years until 2030, how do you see Microsoft’s water stewardship efforts evolving?
Innovation will continue to play a powerful role in protecting freshwater resources and promoting access to water and sanitation services
First and foremost, our focus when it comes to water is to reduce our dependence on freshwater supply by building for efficiency, exploring alternative sources and building new datacenters to support AI workloads that will consume zero water for cooling. From there, we will continue to work to replenish more than we consume across our entire global operations, including owned and leased datacenters. We already have a substantial replenishment program and yet we need to do more. What has become abundantly clear is the need to scale the market to meet demand and the need to focus corporate resources where they can generate the greatest impact — not just for us, but for the world.
Innovation will continue to play a powerful role in protecting freshwater resources and promoting access to water and sanitation services. AI in particular holds promise for accelerating progress in water-efficient design, measuring the impact of our replenishment efforts, and scaling our efforts to benefit more communities.
Lastly, we need collective action — all companies, all NGOs, all investors, and sharp minds in the water space — to help design and implement creative solutions. We are seeing more momentum in the corporate water stewardship space — more goals set, more action, more investment. Working together, we have the potential to catalyse greater impact across ecosystems and water-stressed basins. We plan to build on corporate partnerships to fund innovation and drive action on water issues, and we are excited to be more engaged in water policy in the coming years. Learn more about our path to 2030 in our 2024 Microsoft Environmental Sustainability Report.