Emissions are just one part of the climate fight: IBM's Wayne Balta says the company's key contribution will be its expertise
"We need to demand that these tools [that lead to a low carbon economy] are taken out of the garage and put to use."
The 1980s were marked by a series of high-profile environmental disasters: from the Bhopal gas disaster in India, to Chernobyl, to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In the wake of these instances of corporate negligence, a new recognition dawned: of the need for companies large and small to take responsibility for their actions, to be both proactive and transparent in their approach to the environment.
The '80s also marked the start of Wayne Balta's interest in the corporate environmental agenda. At the time he was a relatively junior staff member at IBM, tasked with researching the technology giant's very first sustainability strategy. Now, as the corporation's sustainability lead, Balta reflects on how the strategy he helped craft all those years ago launched IBM on a 30-year journey that has seen sustainability become embedded as a core priority across the business.
"It set IBM on a path towards integrating this across the company, from finding a management system to addressing it as an enterprise-level issue and, a long-term, strategic imperative," he reflects in an interview with Computing's sister site BusinessGreen. "We've treated it that way ever since."
It also marked the beginning of Balta's own sustainability journey. An engineer by trade, he is now IBM's vice president of corporate environmental affairs, responsible for embedding sustainability across the 350,000-person firm's global operations. "This wasn't my intended career," he admits. "But I liked what I researched so very much, because I realised this subject is one that touches on almost every aspect of what any company does - and that's pretty unique."
IBM has held many guises over the years. Its core business now is in artificial intelligence and cloud computing, but the 110-year-old tech giant has a storied history as a manufacturer of everything from punch card machines, rifles and clocks, through to the floppy disks and computers that made it a global powerhouse.
Balta says IBM owes the strength of its sustainability strategy to its heritage as a vertically integrated manufacturer of hardware. "When you've had that closeness to manufacturing, you get it," he says. "Because you see first-hand the implications of making stuff. IBM had that heritage for decades, we learned early on the importance of this stuff."
Watch out for hyperbole
The firm is currently working towards a string of climate goals, including a plan to deliver net zero emissions across its operations, energy procurement, and electricity at select data centres by 2030. Unlike some other tech giants, IBM does not account for the overwhelming majority of its supply chain emissions in its own carbon accounting. But Balta rejects the notion the firm should report on a broader range of its indirect emissions, such as those generated from travel or suppliers. Firms that attempt to put "wild and loose" Scope 3 emissions estimates into hard, specific numbers in their internal carbon budgeting are opening themselves up to the risk of 'greenwashing', he argues.
"The emissions that actually reach the atmosphere are direct, Scope 1 emissions," he says. "While it is very helpful to account for Scope 2 and Scope 3, it is not necessarily helpful to communicate them as if they're factual numbers when you know that they're not. The engineer in me may be coming out, but be precise - watch out for hyperbole."
Take for instance, emissions generated by staff travel. "If we don't send an employee on an airplane and that airplane still goes in the sky, you haven't reduced a darned thing," he argues. "The atmosphere still received that emission. You can pat yourself on the back all you want - but you really haven't taken something out of the atmosphere. What you have done constructively is you've reduced your demand for a good or an emissions-intensive service. But we think it's hyperbole to say that we would actually have reduced the emission. We choose not to do that."
As such, the only Scope 3 emissions accounted for in the company's plan are those generated through the powering of data centres that exist only to service IBM, he says. To tackle the rest of its supply chain emissions, IBM has pledged to push all "key suppliers" to set emissions reduction goals for their own Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 2022, that are aligned with a 1.5°C warming trajectory. "We require them to stand on their own two feet, to build their own capacity to succeed. That's the way the world will really address climate change."
I abhor greenwashing. Part of my job is to not let it inside the door
Precision is important, Balta says, because greenwashing is on the rise and risks hurting the corporate world's capacity to drive positive environmental change. "I abhor greenwashing," he says. "Part of my job at IBM is to not let it inside the door. So we focus on transparency and authenticity - we don't do opaque representations of achievement."
In line with this commitment to accuracy, IBM has set a hard limit for the residual emissions budget it is allowing itself to reach its net zero target: 350,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent or less. This figure equates to roughly 30 per cent of its 2019 absolute emission levels. Balta says IBM will compensate for these emissions with carbon capture solutions - that are yet to be invented.
IBM's enormous research division is currently working on leveraging AI to explore the properties of materials that can capture, remove, and sequester carbon from the atmosphere. "In this era, the best way to achieve a technological breakthrough quickly is with the aggressive use of information technology to model and learn everything you can so much more quickly than society could do 50 years ago," he reflects. One work stream, for example, is exploring how hybrid cloud technology can more quickly identify rocks that have the right crevices to safely store carbon emissions.
And does IBM see a responsibility to account for the emissions facilitated by its products: for example analytics software IBM Watson, which has long been used by mining, oil, and gas operators to improve their returns? Balta counters that IBM "has always been pretty mindful about the clients with whom it works" and says many of the tools it supplies to emissions intensive sectors are driving clean innovation. "If we just take away tools from these people, that's going to hurt all of us in the long run because we all rely upon them to help us get from where we are today [to where we need to be]," he says. "Even if some of us may look at their businesses today and not really care for them."
"Our view is that addressing climate change is such a large problem, society is going to need the expertise of everybody with technical acumen to help solve it," he adds.
A bigger picture
Net zero targets may be having a moment, but Wayne stresses IBM's 2030 emissions reduction goal is just one part of the picture at IBM. The company's 2030 strategy, unveiled earlier this year, also commits the company to a string of other goals, from targets on renewables procurement and supply chain engagement to the continued honing of the company's environmental management system.
Ultimately, he says, it is this environmental management system that is the centrepiece of a company's sustainability agenda - not flashy targets. IBM's environmental management system has been in place since 1997, when it became the first company in the world to earn a single global registration under the ISO 14001 standard.
"When all is said and done, the thing I'm probably most proud of isn't that we reduced something from X to Y," says Balta. "It is that we leave in place the structure, that no matter what changes in IBM management occur, your organisation and culture can sustain this. That's why the management system is so important."
At the end of the day, Balta stresses, IBM's key contribution to the climate crisis is not going to be that it reduced its emissions to zero, but that it has developed the tools that enable businesses and organisations to tackle the problem and deliver a low carbon economy. IBM core's offering is technology and business acumen, he notes, and both of these are needed in spades to tackle the climate crisis. For instance, the company's technology is currently enabling electricity grid operators to balance increasing levels of renewables capacity, or helping smallholder farmers optimise their fertiliser and water use through digital farming platforms.
But despite the enormous potential of information technology to solve planetary issues, Balta acknowledges that the application of data and digital technologies for environmental ends remains poorly understood and underutilised. The primary beneficiary of the recent explosion of data, artificial intelligence, and information technologies - dubbed by the World Economic Forum as the 'fourth industrial revolution' - has so far been "[a] whole lot of consumerism", he reflects, citing targeted online advertising and voice-activated garage doors as examples.
"I'm not sure there has been the same degree of passion about using the data in these technologies for improving the place where we all live, which is planet Earth," he says. "Or for improving our ways of life, beyond helping people who are privileged [enough] to have the problem of: ‘Open my garage door' or ‘Dim the lights'."
The big structural challenge is that technology companies do not always have a commercial imperative to tap the bounty of environmental data that surrounds them, Balta says. "The tools exist and the technology is more affordable than it's ever been," he reflects. "We're missing the demand."
What we need now is the Lorax
To illustrate his point, Balta draws from a literary analogy. "When my kids were young, I used to read them The Lorax," he says, referring to Dr Seuss' 1971 children's story book whose titular character attempts to stop the destruction of forests all around him. "The Lorax said: 'I'm the Lorax. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues'. What we need now is the Lorax. We need to demand that these tools are taken out of the garage and put to use."
Balta says catalysing the growth of 'data for environment' is one of his priorities as a member of the governing consortium of the United Nations Science Policy Business Forum, a division of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). "It's a difficult nut to crack," he concedes. Governments, the private sector, and financial players all have a role in growing the market by creating the conditions that unleash a much-needed boom in digital solutions that protect environment.
Overall, Balta admits to being optimistic the climate crisis will be averted. More governments and businesses are now committed to the cause than ever before, while the progress towards the crucial technological breakthroughs needed to tackle global emissions and drive a low carbon economy has gathered pace.
"30 to 50 years is a very small spot on the graph of world history," he says. "So, I'd like to think that in another x years, our children will look back and say: 'You know what, we really turned this around and got control of it'. It won't be perfect. It will be messy. There there will be disagreements about what to do and how quickly to do it. But if we all act on facts and authenticity, and with candour, we'll all be better off."
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