Did you know that April 22 is Earth Day?
In 2020, over 100 million people worldwide celebrated the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, driving awareness and actionable learning around environmental issues with activities focused on education, conservation, citizen science, cleanup and more.
In 2021, the #EarthDay theme is Restore Our Earth with a focus on five topics:
Sustainability is an area of significant importance to Microsoft and we wanted to do something to help create awareness and empower actionable learning around relevant topics for technologists.
In a January 2020 announcement, Microsoft laid out ambitious company-level goals for sustainability including: being carbon negative by 2030, removing historical carbon emissions by 2050, and establishing a $1B climate innovation fund to invest in research in context. One year later, the Environmental Sustainability Report (read the three-part blog coverage) reviewed progress, focusing on four pillars:
This is progress at organization scale. But you might be asking yourself -- "how can I educate myself on the issues and contribute to, or advocate for, sustainable living and engineering practices in my community and workplace?" We're glad you asked!
Here are a few resources to get you started on your learning journey:
Awareness is great but actionable learning is better! So we came up with a fun challenge for April, just in time for #EarthDay!
Action: #VisualGreenTech Challenge
Here is how this works:
Submit responses to as many prompts as you like, as many times as you want to. The goal is to create awareness around those topics and share our own learnings and perspectives in context. Want a sneak peek at the prompts in advance? check out the gallery here.
But wait. There's one more thing!
Along with featuring all submitted visual Earth Day images, we will also work with Ecosia to plant 1,000 trees in honor of all #VisualGreenTech challenge participants to help tackle climate change. Yes, that's right! Let's give back to the earth and learn more about sustainability in the process.
Have questions? Leave us a comment on this post! And let’s make a difference to this planet.
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