The Chinese tech company has pioneered a ‘Scope 3+’ concept that goes beyond conventional value chain emissions reduction and is targeted at empowering businesses on its platforms to go low-carbon. It brings to Malaysia its suite of AI-based sustainability tools.
For Malaysian firm UEM Edgenta, greenhouse gas emissions tracking has for a long time been a manual process.
The Kuala Lumpur-based asset management and infrastructure company, keen to calculate and report across its Scope 1 to 3 emissions, had been looking to streamline its environment, social and governance (ESG) strategies. It also wanted to simplify its sustainability reporting processes for a compliance exercise that it was undertaking, but found that it lacked the technological capabilities to do so.
Hence, last year, when Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, expressed interest to work with more companies to adopt its artificial intelligence (AI) sustainability tools and solutions, UEM Edgenta was one of the firms eager to pursue the partnership. It made a huge leap in transforming its business strategy into a technology-driven one, and among the new solutions it adopted was Energy Expert, a software-as-a-service tool for energy consumption and carbon management.
UEM Edgenta has since integrated the tool developed by Alibaba Cloud, which is capable of helping enterprises obtain real-time sustainability performance statistics and identify emissions sources, into its own cloud-based data platform. In September last year, the firm launched a set of climate targets and announced its commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. A key thrust of its decarbonisation strategy is enhancing energy efficiency of its operations.
In China, home to some of the world’s largest technology companies, cloud computing has played a pivotal role in facilitating energy-light digitalisation. Unlike the traditional use of localised hardware and servers for data storage, cloud computing uses web-based infrastructure, eliminating the need to construct sizeable server farms and substantially reducing operational carbon emissions. Industry insiders believe it provides unprecedented opportunities for decarbonisation through the integration of data intelligence and AI technologies.
