In early 2020, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella hopped on a relatively small stage to announce big news to the world — the tech giant was determined to reach carbon negativity by removing even more carbon than it emits in just a decade. To do that, it was not only cutting emissions from its direct operations but also across its whole supply chain. Yet that last part was set to be a gargantuan challenge.

The following year, one of Microsoft’s electronics suppliers, a Taiwan-based company called Chicony Electronics, opened a new factory in Thailand and expanded some of its plants in China. With the upgraded facilities, its production grew. In a sort of snowball effect, it had to buy more things, hire more services, and its footprint expanded. In fact, just in new services, Chicony reported a 230 percent increase in emissions in 2021. By the end of the year, its total CO2 emissions had gone through the roof, hitting an almost 700 percent increase from the previous year. 

Chicony is just one of several cases where Microsoft’s suppliers have not necessarily aligned with the tech giant’s climate targets. Two years after setting its “carbon negativity” goal, Microsoft has struggled to limit its suppliers’ use of fossil fuels, which has become, in the words of the company’s own 2022 Sustainability Report, its “ultimate decarbonization challenge.”

The Verge reviewed 27 emissions inventories selected at random from Microsoft’s list of top 100 suppliers, using voluntarily submitted data from the non-profit disclosure system CDP. While some of Microsoft’s suppliers were making progress in cleaning up their carbon footprint, most had actually increased their emissions since the company announced its big climate ambitions. 

Some suppliers did not even have a single contract to power their factories with electricity from renewable sources. This means all their electricity consumption — their main source of emissions — was coming from fossil fuels. 

The Verge analyzed a small sample compared to Microsoft’s thousands of suppliers, but the data gathered shows many of them haven’t necessarily complied with the tech giant’s net-negative target.

In 14 out of 27 cases analyzed, Microsoft’s top suppliers reported a rise in emissions — which ended up reflecting in the tech giant’s own emissions reports. Between 2020 and 2021, Microsoft’s supply chain emissions grew 15 percent to reach 12,510,000 metric tons of CO2, an amount similar to the country of Panama’s entire footprint in 2021. In 2022, those emissions continued to grow at a slower rate.

Still, controlling supply chain emissions is not exclusively Microsoft’s challenge. Most big tech companies are highly reliant on fossil fuels across their products’ life cycle supply chains, according to a 2022 report by Greenpeace. Out of the top 10 ranked consumer electronics brands, only Apple had made significant progress in cleaning up its supply chain, the report said. The company achieved this by supporting some of its suppliers in reaching 100 percent renewable energy by 2030 and adding close to 16 GW of new power across its supply chain. 

Microsoft has even made some progress reducing emissions from its direct activities. The company was one of the only three big tech companies analyzed by Greenpeace —alongside Apple and Google — that managed to go 100 percent renewable in their direct operations. However, these emissions are tiny (less than 5 percent of their total footprint) when compared to their supply chain’s footprint. 

Like most tech giants, this is where Microsoft has struggled, said Reena Skribbe, climate policy analyst at the think-tank NewClimate Institute. “It remains unclear how Microsoft plans to reduce most of its (supply chain) emissions,” she said.

While other sectors like transportation or the fossil fuel industry can have a more direct impact on global emissions, Big Tech’s footprint is important for its sheer size, said Glen Dowell, senior director of MBA programs at Cornell University and corporate responsibility researcher. “Increasingly, our daily life is interfacing with these companies. They’re trying to get more and more share of our time. And so, every second of our use can be accounted for in energy,” Dowel said in an interview with The Verge.

“It is absolutely possible to reduce tech supply chain emissions in line with a 1.5 degrees Celsius pathway, but it won’t happen unless tech giants like Microsoft target 100 percent renewable energy across the supply chain by 2030,” said Greanpeace’s East Asia Global Tech Project lead, Xueying Wu, referring to the global temperature rise limit imposed by the Paris agreement.

The Verge contacted Microsoft for comment, but the company declined to respond.

Dirty chain

Microsoft’s value chain is messy and complicated, but it can be divided into five general stages: sourcing raw materials (basically, mining), processing the minerals, turning them into component parts, assembling components and, in the last stage, Microsoft’s finished products — the laptop, tablet or gaming console you directly buy. Then, emissions calculations also take into account the energy you consume when using those products up until their disposal. 

There are over 400 Microsoft factories in 23 different countries, and the whole process involves “tens of thousands” of suppliers and “millions” of customers using their products, according to the company’s 2022 report. As a result, despite the company’s efforts, emissions can go up if its suppliers don’t cooperate. And they often don’t.

Fourteen out of 27 of Microsoft’s top suppliers reviewed by The Verge reported an increase in their emissions. Several of them cited the covid-19 pandemic as a major disruptor. Hynix, a South Korean semiconductor manufacturer, stated that “in 2021, the increased use of computers, laptops and smart devices caused by covid-19 increased demand for DRAM and NAND (chips), resulting in increased greenhouse gas emissions.” In 2021, the company reported gross sales of $42,9 billion — a 35 percent rise from the previous year. At the same time, emissions in 2021 increased 1.19 percent from 2020. 

In reply to The Verge, Hynix said it increased its renewable energy portfolio —particularly in China — and managed to lower direct emissions from its operations in 2022. The figure is still under third-party verification and does not account for the full life cycle of its products. 

Other large suppliers also said the pandemic led to a rise in emissions. Intel, the world’s second-largest chipmaker, reported an 11 percent emissions increase in 2021 from the previous year, mainly due to getting more sales. In a reply to The Verge, the company said emissions from its direct operations decreased 4 percent the following year, in part due to using a larger amount of renewables to power its plants.

Qualcomm, the world’s third-largest chipmaker, reported a 27 percent increase between 2019 and 2021, saying it created new facilities that increased emissions.

On at least two occasions, suppliers did not have one single renewable energy purchase, which means all of their electricity and fuel consumption came from fossil fuels. Taiwanese battery manufacturer Dynapack reported zero renewable consumption in 2021, even though the company is aiming to achieve 100 percent by the end of the decade. This was also the case for Taiwanese manufacturing supplier AVC, which consumed all of its energy in 2021 from fossil fuels.

While all other suppliers did claim to use renewable energy in their operations, some of them weren’t really using that much. Both South Korea’s Hynix and Taiwan’s Chicony reported only 4 percent of their energy came from renewables in 2021. Hynix claims to have increased its renewable energy portfolio to 30 percent in 2022. The data is not yet publicly available, but it’s due to be published in July.

In many cases, however, accessing renewables is not that easy. Many countries do not have enough clean energy to supply large operations. AVC, for example, stated in its reports that its factories in Southern China did not have access to renewable electricity yet. Microsoft has made some efforts to offset this issue by adding renewables into several countries’ national grids. In Ireland, the company added about 900 MW of onshore wind and solar, which is equivalent to 30 percent of the country’s target for renewable electricity produced by private corporations. Still, the company does not request its suppliers to do the same.

In contrast, nine of Microsoft’s suppliers reviewed by The Verge reported progress in lowering their emissions. In some cases, they achieved this by buying electricity from different places. AVX, a Japanese-US microprocessors manufacturer, noted that last year, it adopted new solar power sources and increased purchases of “green power” in the US and Europe.  

In most cases reviewed, suppliers reported their biggest source of emissions came from electricity consumption and use of fuels in their facilities, with the two most common sources being oil and gas.

The Verge contacted all suppliers mentioned in the story but only received responses from Intel and Hynix.

Getting strict

Microsoft’s strategy toward net zero is ambitious. Beyond just reaching net zero by 2030, the company wants to suck more carbon out of the atmosphere than it emits every year. But experts consulted by The Verge say this would require stricter efforts on its part. 

To address its direct emissions, the company has purchased more than 13 GW of low-carbon energy and has also made a significant gamble on carbon removal. Microsoft already removes about 1.4 million metric tons of its CO2 emissions through carbon offsets. But its long-term ambitions are about five times greater, aiming to remove more than 5 million metric tons by 2030 — which is more carbon than all the CO2 absorbed by Costa Rica’s forests every year.

In the short term, most of Microsoft’s carbon removal comes from forestry projects, according to its 2022 offsets report. These types of projects have gained criticism recently for not adding new emissions reductions and, at times, catching fire. Microsoft, too, says in its 2022 report this generates “concerns” about how long these projects can last without being degraded. 

But in the long term, the tech giant’s bet is even more complex — and riskier. Microsoft signed a 10-year deal with the Swiss company Climeorks to build machines that can suck carbon out of the air and store it in basalt rock, a method the company claims is already achieving results. This technology, however, is unproven at scale, and the UN recently discouraged its use to offset emissions.

While direct emissions have straightforward solutions, Microsoft’s approach toward supply chain emissions is less clear, experts consulted by The Verge said. The tech sector has a particularly global supply chain, Cornell’s Dowell explained, which makes it difficult to even trace it. In part, Microsoft can’t directly control where its suppliers operate, but the company can enforce tighter regulations, he said. Both Wu, from Greenpeace, and Skribbe, with the NewClimate Institute, agreed.

In July 2022, Microsoft updated its Supplier Code of Conduct to require all suppliers to cut carbon emissions by 55 percent by 2030. While this was a step in the right direction, some details are still uncertain, Srkibbe said. One of them, for example, is that it remains unclear whether suppliers can rely on carbon offsets to achieve the target instead of directly replacing fossil fuels with renewables, she said.

“Microsoft should require its suppliers to achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2030 and support them in this transition,” Wu said. 

Most big tech companies have a similarly complex chain, but some have found effective ways to help suppliers decarbonize, Wu said. Apple, for example, created incentives for suppliers with 100 percent renewable energy targets and has mobilized more than 200 of them to use clean energy for their products. Still, the company’s code of conduct does not explicitly require them to reach 100 percent renewable energy. Microsoft has built new renewable energy into several countries’ national grids but does not have a similar program of incentives with suppliers.

“As a major global player, Microsoft is in a unique position that allows them to significantly increase the pressure on its suppliers to reduce their emissions. It is the responsibility of Microsoft to show that they are serious about reducing emissions,” Skribbe said.

“If a company with that much market power cannot influence the climate ambition of its suppliers, then I don’t know who could,” she added.

Nature’s scale can be very difficult to comprehend. The largest rainforest on the planet, for example, the Amazon spans for almost 2.6 million square miles, crossing the borders of nine countries. That’s more than twice the size of India and equivalent to 68 percent of the US total area.

Trying to protect something so big is a challenge of similar size and complexity, but that was made easier by Google’s Earth Engine, a geospatial processing service directed to researchers and other public policy experts. Launched in 2010, it completely changed the way scientists can track forest loss all around the world by making the process much faster and wider — and it all started with one person’s curiosity. 

In 2005, Google engineer Rebecca Moore learned about a new logging project near her home in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California. Although the project’s plan was shared with her community by the developers, it was hardly informative or transparent. 

“It was a 400-page document with a sketchy black-and-white map that no one could understand. No one could even tell where it was going to be, much less the details of what was being proposed,” she says. 

A self-described map geek, she decided to use Google Earth, the global visualization tool that was released a few years before, to look into the targeted 1,000-acre area. The high-resolution satellite images showed what the 400 pages didn’t: the project would impact daily life of not only the 2,000 people in the community but also residents of the broader Silicon Valley community who got their drinking water from that region. 

The area was made up of coastal redwood, an endangered sequoia species that includes some of the tallest living trees and the longest-living organisms on Earth.

“It turned out, the helicopters were going to be landing and taking off and hauling the logs over the nursery school and the daycare center,” she recalls. “It was going to go right up to within 100 meters of three schools.”

With a flyover video of less than two minutes, she was able to mobilize the community and ultimately stop the logging project. “Seeing the scale of destruction, seeing where deforestation is happening, gives you insights into what’s causing it, which areas are more threatened and need more protection,” says Moore, who is now the director of Google Earth, Earth Engine and Outreach. 

Powered by the cloud

Although that was a relatively small area and tackled only a specific moment, being able to help stop the logging project using Google Earth sparked in Moore the idea that some similar monitoring could be done to the world’s forests. But for it to work, researchers would need to have access to an enormous database and to tools for processing all this data — that was the seed of Google Earth Engine. 

Until then, maps and satellite images would be stored in different institutions, such as NASA and other government agencies, and scientists had to gather this information and download it in their computers, and only then could they start the analysis. It was timely, taking weeks to collect it all, and costly, due to the hardware power needed. 

“Google Earth Engine changes this paradigm,” explains Gilberto Câmara, a computer scientist and former director of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE). “Instead of the data going to where the software is, which is your computer, the software goes to where the data is, which is Google.”

The tech giant gathered the free-access satellite imagery from research institutions around the globe, from the US to Europe and Brazil, uploaded it to its cloud service, and made it available to academics, along with programming functions to process the data. “This obviously benefits greatly from Google’s ability to be a big data warehouse,” Câmara says.

“We’re using the Google data centers to bring in, every day, thousands and thousands of images from hundreds of satellites and other data sources and store them in a form that’s ready for analysis,” says Moore. 

The first target of all of that machine power was the world’s largest tropical forest. At the Amazon Institute of People and the Environment (Imazon), a nonprofit organization, was built the first operational forest monitoring system on Earth Engine. It was integrated into its Deforestation Alert System to report the pace of forest degradation and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon on a monthly basis.

That work was followed by a breakthrough analysis. Published in Science in 2013, it was the first high-resolution map of the world’s forests and how they had changed over the prior 12 years. 

“It had never been done before, and the reason was: it required more than a million hours of computation. But because we ran it on 10,000 computers in parallel, we had the result in a few days. On a single computer, it would have taken 15 years,” Moore explains. 

Deforestation and the fight against climate change

Energy is a huge deal when talking about climate change since the world is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels. However, deforestation is a big driver of the global temperature increase, too — not only because it reduces the amount of carbon storage available but also due to the carbon emitted by forest destruction. That is particularly important in Brazil’s case. 

According to the most recent official data, the Brazilian Amazon lost over 4,466 square miles of forest coverage from August 2021 to July 2022 (deforestation numbers are measured by taking into account the rainy season in the region, which ends in July). To get a better understanding of the scale of the destruction, that is the equivalent of almost 15 times New York City’s area.

The destruction of the Amazon rainforest affects not only the region and the communities who live there but the whole world. It helps regulate the global climate by storing carbon and releasing billions of tonnes of water into the atmosphere. Protecting its biodiversity also helps to prevent new disease outbreaks and possible sources for medicines.

To try to revert the high rates of deforestation, the Brazilian government just released a new plan that ranges from fighting environmental crime to promoting bioeconomy activities that generate income for local communities while keeping the forest standing.

The largest country in Latin America, Brazil is the seventh biggest annual emitter of greenhouse gasses, accounting for 3 percent of the world total, according to 2019 data compiled by the World Resources Institute. The top emitters are China (25.2 percent), the United States (12 percent), and India (7 percent).

While around 71 percent of the world’s electric power comes from nonrenewable sources, that number drops to 17 percent in Brazil. Most of the country’s carbon emissions come from deforestation and changes in land use, accounting for about 49 percent of their emissions in 2021. 

This figure is generated every year by the System of Estimates of Emissions and Removal of Greenhouse Gases, a non-governmental initiative. The system has a sister platform called MapBiomas (“MapBiomes,” in a literal translation), which tracks deforestation, fires, mining, surface water, infrastructure, and quality of pastures in the whole country.

Created by a network of scientists and research institutions, MapBiomas was first launched in 2015 at the UN climate conference in Paris. 

“We needed to produce a map every year to see if the public policies and recommendations we made affected emissions and removals of greenhouse gasses,” says Marcos Rosa, the technical coordinator of MapBiomas. 

That was hard because it demanded a huge dataset (daily, high-resolution pictures of the entire country), a lot of processing power, and machine learning (to identify and classify changes on the satellite images of the Amazon and Brazil’s five other biomes). 

That’s where the Google Earth Engine came into play. “It was essential. Google Earth Engine was what made it possible for [researchers in] each biome to work remotely without having to purchase a big computational infrastructure,” says Rosa. 

This kind of monitoring was taken to a worldwide scale by the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch (GFW), launched in 2014. The platform’s director, Mikaela Weisse, explains that the institute has been involved in providing transparent forest information since the 1990s but, until then, didn’t have the technology to make it global. 

“A number of advancements have made that possible — including free access to satellite imagery and better internet access around the world — but a key piece of that is the cloud computing and power to analyze satellite images using Google Earth Engine,” she says. 

Some of their partners are researchers at the University of Maryland and Wageningen University, who use Google’s system to create near-real-time deforestation alerts, detecting changes in the forest as soon as possible in order to inspire a response.

Nevertheless, Weisse sees some gaps in the data available. “The tropics are particularly difficult to monitor using satellite imagery because they are so often cloudy. There is also less historical and ground information available in those locations,” she says, adding that there are efforts from both public and private organizations to address this issue. 

Public data managed by a private entity

Although the scientists who spoke to The Verge didn’t express particular concerns about it, Google is a huge company that, naturally, has its own economic interests — that will not always align with environmental issues. In Earth Engine’s case, problems hypothetically could arise regarding the reliability of the data being publicized or the interest of the company to keep the platform running, for example. 

Google’s Rebecca Moore emphasizes that all the images they’re providing are in the public domain. “This is data coming from government satellites, for example, in the US, Brazil, Europe, Japan,” she says. “And all of the data is scientifically peer-reviewed.” 

“I don’t see conflicts of interest that would have any impact on the data produced by independent researchers with Earth Engine,” says Weisse. “The biggest risk is if Google decided it wasn’t in their economic interest to continue offering this service — that would be a huge loss for the research community.”

Even though Google’s service was the first of its kind, today, there are alternatives, such as Microsoft Planetary Computing and Amazon’s Earth on AWS. “Several countries have also launched efforts to have their own Google-like platforms,” says INPE’s Gilberto Câmara. 

He claims that Google democratized the access to information but thinks Earth Engine didn’t evolve much since 2010. “It has some processing capabilities, but it’s not a universal system that gives access to state-of-the-art machine learning methods.”

MapBiomas’ Marcos Rosa says that, even though they have a partnership with Google for digital storage space, the company has never tried to meddle with the content being produced by them. 

“We have always kept an alternative for the data that we produce with Google Earth Engine. So, if Google has a change in policy — which has never happened — we can replicate [the model] on another platform, such as Amazon’s.”

Increasingly, companies are releasing new net-zero goals to neutralize their greenhouse gas emissions in the future. And instead of substantially reducing their carbon emissions, a lot of those pledges rely on using a technique called forest carbon capture.

But a new study reinforces what scientists have been saying for a while: counting on trees to do the dirty work of removing the CO2 we have put on the atmosphere won’t be enough to stop climate change. 

A paper published today in Science posits that, if we stop all human management on forests (for example, wood harvesting) under current climatic conditions and with the CO2 concentration that already exists, their aboveground biomass could increase by up to 44.1 gigatons of carbon. 

If that seems like a lot, it’s because it is. However, it would mean a 15–16 percent increase over current levels of carbon storage, which equals about four years of current CO2 emissions by human activities. 

Without strong reductions in emissions, the paper concludes that this strategy has a low potential to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The researchers also highlight that the forest carbon sink (its ability to absorb carbon) should be preserved to offset residual emissions from sectors where they are unavoidable, rather than to compensate for present emission levels.

Forests act as carbon sinks because, as trees grow, they use CO2 in the photosynthesis process and turn it into plant matter, or biomass. They also store carbon on the ground by enhancing the soil’s organic matter. That is why forests play a key role in preventing the planet from overheating.

In places where logging or other issues have damaged the forest, restoring the area could enhance the amount of carbon absorbed there. This kind of “repairing” is what is being sold as one of the solutions to suck CO2 from the atmosphere — while giving a free pass for companies to keep their “business as usual” emission levels. 

But there is a limit to what forests can actually do.

“We focused more critically on naturally occurring disturbances that happen in forests without any human intervention, such as fires, storm related damage, insects etc. This led to an estimated additional carbon storage potential that is more than twice as small as the previous estimates,” says Caspar Roebroek, the lead author of the study and a researcher at ETH Zurich and the European Commission Joint Research Centre. 

They were also able to estimate that an area of 1.6 million kilometers squared (almost 618 million square miles) would need to be reforested to compensate for a single year of our current carbon emission levels. This is roughly the size of Alaska and larger than Spain, Germany, and France combined. 

Besides, it takes time for forests to grow to maturity, from decades to centuries. Meanwhile, the climate crisis is already here, and humanity needs to act fast to limit global warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to meet the goals of the Paris agreement.

Mathematician Thelma Krug, one of the vice presidents of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s most important forum on climate, thinks that the study delivers an important message. “It shows that forests, alone, won’t save the planet.”

She explains that all the models the IPCC works with now show that carbon dioxide removal will be necessary to reach net-zero emissions in particular sectors. However, the models show that many different strategies will be needed to do it fast enough — the most significant being ambitious emission cuts. 

Krug says that companies that are investing in forest carbon capture may not realize two important things: that this approach takes time and that forests are also vulnerable to climate change, so their own carbon sink capacity may be hurt by Earth’s higher temperatures. 

“Climate change is happening very fast and things tend to get worse really quickly. At the same time, companies are not taking action where it’s most needed, which is the cut of fossil emissions.”

Although it demonstrates their limits to carbon absorption, the new study in no way diminishes the environmental and climate value of protecting forests. 

“From a climate change perspective, the more carbon we can keep on land the better,” says Roebroek, as deforestation and forest fires are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions.  

“At current emission levels, forests can only contribute to a limited extent to climate change mitigation, but if we collectively reduce substantially the emissions of CO2 from fossil sources, the relative contribution of forests might become very important to close the gap to carbon neutrality,” he points out.

In addition to that, forests have other roles that go way beyond the carbon cycle. Among other services, they modulate temperature changes, help to prevent the spread of diseases, and are home to millions of species and thousands of traditional communities around the world.