Commercial, Energy Efficiency, GHG Emissions, Industrial  -  September 17, 2018

21 companies sign Step Up Declaration

Twenty-one companies have joined to launch the Step Up Declaration, an alliance dedicated to harnessing the power of emerging technologies and the fourth industrial revolution to help reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across all economic sectors and ensure a climate turning point by 2020.

According to a statement released at the Global Climate Action Summit, declaration signatories include Akamai Technologies, Arm, Autodesk, Bloomberg, BT, Cisco Systems, Ericsson, HP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lyft, Nokia, Salesforce, Supermicro, Symantec, Tech Mahindra, Uber, Vigilent, VMware, WeWork, Workday, and Zoox. The statement said, "Collectively these organizations cover a broad range of industries capable of delivering significant GHG emissions cuts across buildings, data-centers, finance, telecoms, transport and more."

The declaration, developed with leadership from Salesforce, is a response to a challenge issued in May 2018 by Christiana Figueres, Convenor of Mission 2020, which urged the the technology sector to "dramatically 'step up' climate action, to demonstrate their own progress ahead of 2020, and show how they can intentionally help the rest of the global economy decarbonize." The declaration "acknowledges the role its signatories can play in demonstrating and enabling progress both in their immediate spheres of influence and collaboratively with others— across all sectors of society, including individuals, corporations, civil society, and governments."