When technology and sustainability intersect to combat the climate crisis

“Technology, in particular, has the potential to unlock solutions to some of the biggest challenges we face. But only if we act now. Only if impressive ambition becomes real, lasting action.”

I couldn’t agree more with these words from Microsoft UK CEO Clare Barclay. If we remember anything from the discussions at COP26 over these two weeks, it is that there is no time to waste when it comes to tackling climate change – we must act now.

It is incredibly motivating to know that technology has a fundamental role to play in tackling the climate crisis. We have the talent and tools at our fingertips to develop and deliver real advances in our fight against global warming.

Bupa recently announced its ambition to be a net zero business by 2040, underpinned by science-based targets for all emission scopes, which are aligned to keep global warming to no more than 1.5°C. These are big, ambitious goals but ones we are absolutely committed to delivering upon because, as an international healthcare funder and provider, we know the health of people and the health of the planet depend upon it.

Technology is playing a huge role in our journey to get to net zero. With sustainability at the heart of Bupa’s new strategy, many of us working in the tech space have a privileged opportunity to develop digital solutions that can enable the business transformation that our net zero ambitions require.

There are obvious ways in which the digital transformation of Bupa will help us to meet our ambitious net zero targets. The first is digital healthcare, which allows people to consume their health services in the place they choose, whether that be at home, the office, a care home or on holidays. By providing enhanced telehealth options for our customers, we could significantly reduce our emissions from travel, building and equipment power.

Paper reduction is another one – there is a huge amount of paper in the healthcare industry and moving our people and customers onto digital platforms allows us to remove that waste.

I recently spoke to Microsoft about the tech-led advancements Bupa is making to achieve our sustainability goals for their report Accelerating the journey to net zero. Key examples include developing strategies to reduce the carbon emissions of our technology operations by utilising public cloud services and adopting digital technologies to reduce the carbon footprint of our business processes.

At Bupa, we are doing this through the migration of key applications in our leading and core markets globally to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and rolling out Dynamics 365 for Bupa teams in the UK and Australia.

Projects like these enable us to become a much more data-driven organisation, using cloud-native data services to develop more intelligent insights about our services and our customers. This in turn enables us to make more intelligent decisions about how we offer personalised healthcare, create more sustainable policies and deliver on Bupa’s ambition to be the most customer-centric healthcare company in the world.

This migration also directly drives Microsoft and Bupa’s joint sustainability goals by decreasing the carbon footprint involved with running on-premises data centres by around 30 per cent.

Responsibility for sustainability is being embedded throughout our organisation, across all our core projects, all our future work, and all our new products and services – and that means working as fast as possible to reach net zero across all three scopes of emissions.

It's not going to be easy, but I couldn’t be more energised and excited by the path and challenges ahead.

To learn more about the Microsoft report, click here: Accelerating the journey to net zero (microsoft.com)