ITP Techblog

Users of the Salesforce CRM platform now have an easy place to source trusted providers of carbon credits to offset their emissions-generating activities.

Salesforce this week revealed deails of its Net Zero Marketplace, which will feature 90 carbon credit providers active in 11 countries in Africa, Australia, Europe, Latin America and the US.

The carbon credit providers are not vetted by Saleforce itself but will feature third-party ratings, project descriptions and how the scheme aligns with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Salesforce executives said this week at their Dreamforce 2022 conference in San Francisco that the creation of the marketplace was to help businesses cut through the complicated process of choosing a credible carbon offset programme.

“Businesses aiming to achieve long-term emission reductions can complement their efforts with high-quality carbon credits. Net Zero Marketplace brings together Salesforce’s values, technology, and commitment to ecopreneurs to accelerate climate action,” says Suzanne DiBianca, Executive Vice President and Chief Impact Officer at Salesforce.

The carbon credit projects featured on the Net Zero Marketplace, which is built on Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud platform, go through a “series of independent verifications against global standards. If they pass the verification process, the projects can issue carbon credits that can then be sold.” 

The featured projects include forest conservation, tree planting, wind farms, solar cookstoves, or better farming methods. Some of the carbon credit providers included in the scheme include: Climate Impact Partners, Cloverly, Lune, Pachama, Native, A Public Benefit Corporation, Respira International, and South Pole, third-party rating companies Calyx Global and Sylvera, and curated climate portfolio provider CO2.com.

While the marketplace is built on Salesforce, you don’t have to be a Salesforce customer or technology user to purchase carbon credits from Net Zero Marketplace, which will act as an e-commerce platform to handle the transactions.

Sustainability in the cloud

Sunya Norman, Vice President of ESG Strategy and Engagement at Salesforce, told ITP Techblog that purchasing carbon credits was a measure companies could take now to offset their emissions while they work on reducing their emissions at the source as part of net zero 2050 goals.

Salesforce has a Net Zero Cloud product aimed at companies that want to track their emissions reduction and produce reports and key indicators for compliance and audit reports.

“The true vision is that they use Net Zero cloud to track all of their carbon data to identify what their footprint actually is to make actual reduction reductions over time,” says Norman.

The Net Zero Cloud was actually built by Salesforce to facilitate its own emissions-reduction programme.

“We were just like many companies, working in spreadsheets, it was embarrassing. We are this world-class CRM, and we're doing this in spreadsheets,” Norman says.

Salesforce has now automated much of the process of gathering everything from energy use data of Salesforce buildings to data on the diversity of its workforce, key metrics tracked as part of its ESG (environment, social, governance) reporting.

“For our own reporting, we take carbon data from building systems and have APIs that automate data flows,” says Norman.

“So we can do our carbon accounting, we have automated calculations, all things that were prone to a lot of human error and took months of human time. We also have some extrapolation and forecasting.”

Peter Griffin attended Dreamforce 2022 as a guest of Salesforce