Microsoft Sustainability RFI: Driving to a Carbon Negative Globe
Region: Global
What it is
Microsoft is issuing this Request for Information (RFI) to engage with the research and technical community committed to driving to a carbon negative globe.
About
In January 2020, Microsoft announced a commitment and detailed plan to be carbon negative by 2030 and to remove from the environment all the carbon the company emitted since its founding by 2050. Over 2020, we built on this pledge by announcing a series of commitments to be water positive by 2030, zero waste by 2030, and to protect ecosystems by developing a Planetary Computer.
We grounded our sustainability strategy and commitments in the belief that technology can help solve the world’s biggest challenges. We believe that by focusing on all the ways we can drive change, we can make an outsized impact on climate change. We, and other organizations that are committed to an environmentally sustainable future, need to pull all levers of impact we have — including, and perhaps especially, partnering in innovation with the scientific community around the world.
Achieving these goals will be challenging and will require an interdisciplinary approach, new innovations, engineering to make it real, policies to make it tangible globally, and science: from developing research and technologies for scalable and affordable carbon negative economies, to finding incentives to remove carbon, to working collaboratively on enabling AI-based platforms to accelerate scientific areas such as material science, chemistry, or synthetic biology.
To that end, Microsoft is issuing this Request for Information (RFI) to engage with the research and technical community committed to driving to a carbon negative globe. This information from the community will be invaluable as we plan for future research collaborations and engagements focused on reaching carbon negative for all of humanity, globally.
Who can submit and on which topics
This RFI seeks input from members of the scientific community and sustainability stakeholders from academic institutions and public scientific organizations, including national labs, on driving to a carbon negative globe. Microsoft may use the responses to this RFI to inform future planning, including research summits and an open call for proposals to the academic community. For this specific RFI, we welcome ideas that can accelerate progress toward technological breakthroughs enabling economic, global scale application of the following topic areas:
- carbon removal
- renewable energy
- materials with lower or negative carbon footprint
All ideas are welcome, including those incorporating one or more of computational, simulation, machine learning, physical, chemical, biological, or synthetic biological approaches to these challenges.
Instructions to submitters and how to respond to this RFI
Interested stakeholders are invited to use this to provide their information. The submission form requires the following information:
- Contact person name and affiliation
- Domain(s) of expertise, discipline(s)/sub-discipline(s)
- Contact email address
- Ideas specific to the topic areas
- Webpage (optional)
Deadline
- To respond to this RFI, please use the official form (opens in new tab).
- Submissions are due by October 28, 2021, 11:59pm PDT.
Your response to this RFI is subject to Microsoft’s Terms of Use (opens in new tab). Microsoft will use the information submitted in response to this RFI at its discretion and has no obligation to provide responses or comments to any responder’s submission. No proprietary, classified, confidential, or sensitive information should be included in your response.
Learn more
Contact us
Direct any questions not answered here to mssusrfi@microsoft.com