Pledge overview

At Salesforce, we believe business is one of the greatest platforms for change. We strive to serve all stakeholders, including our shareholders, customers, employees, partners, communities, the planet, and society as a whole. We believe that the business of business is improving the state of the world.

We consider the environment to be a key stakeholder and we are committed to harnessing our culture of innovation to improve the state of the world. We leverage the power of our people and our products to reduce the impact that we and our customers have on the planet. Salesforce has net zero residual emissions. That means we match all residual scope 1, 2 (market-based), and scope 3 emissions with an equivalent amount of carbon credits on an annual basis. We are committed to doing everything we can to step up to the urgent challenge of climate change and create a sustainable, low-carbon future for all. That means reducing emissions and protecting and improving carbon sinks like forests.

Forests, critical to the health of our planet, covered about half the earth before the agricultural revolution began. In the 8,000 years since, while we’ve managed to feed and house billions of people, we’ve also lost or degraded half of those forests, fueling a biodiversity collapse and the climate crisis. It’s time we stop taking from our natural ecosystems and start giving back.

That’s why in January 2020, as a founding partner of 1t.org and in support of its mission, Salesforce announced our goal to help fund the conservation, restoration, and growth of 100 million trees by the end of 2030. We do so for humans and other life on this planet, to help mitigate climate change, to improve livelihoods, and so much more.

Since our ambitious goal was announced last year, we have supported 20+ projects throughout the world and funded approximately 46 million trees. Our current projects are visible at https://trees.salesforce.com/, and we plan to continue expanding our work globally to reach our goal to help fund 100 million trees by 2030. We hope to continue to catalyze change on a much bigger scale by demonstrating, enabling, and advocating for it. As we work to meet our goals and set the world on a more just path, we encourage every company, every community, and every person to join us. Together is the only way we can meet the challenges of this moment and leave a better planet for future generations.

Guiding our work are four principles, which we continue to refine. We are developing tools for ourselves and others to put these principles into action:

1. CUT EMISSIONS - Nature-Based Solutions are powerful solutions to capture carbon from the atmosphere. They are not a substitute for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. In this climate emergency, we need to do many things at once: cutting fossil fuel emissions, decarbonizing our economy and maintaining, sustainably managing, and restoring ecosystems.

2. CONSERVE & PROTECT EXISTING ECOSYSTEMS - Intact soils, forests, mangroves, grasslands, shrublands, and other ecosystems are vital repositories of carbon and biodiversity. Yet we are losing them at an alarming rate. Protecting these last remaining strongholds of nature is critical.

3. BE SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE - We must genuinely engage Indigenous peoples and local communities and respect and uphold their rights and leadership. We must proactively contribute to fair and sustainable economic models that create new employment opportunities while avoiding competition with existing activities such as food production.

4. BE ECOLOGICALLY RESPONSIBLE - Nature-Based Solutions must be founded on rigorous ecological principles. Biodiversity is vital for healthy ecosystems which are more productive, resilient and beneficial. Diverse mixtures of native species provide desired benefits such as carbon storage, food production, and protection from floods, drought and disease. Monocultures of exotic species or low-diversity plantations are unlikely to provide these desired benefits.

Our ecologically and socially responsible approach

We evaluate every project we support to ensure they're conserving/restoring/growing the right trees, in the right place, by the right people, for the right reasons. To do so, we have used global best practices and worked with several leading organizations and experts to develop a set of criteria (which we continue to improve upon) that incorporates leading science and builds off the IUCN Nature Based Solutions framework. To select projects, we issue targeted RFPs on a rolling basis which utilize these criteria to identify leading projects. On an ongoing basis we update these criteria and monitor the projects we’ve funded against them. We hope to share a draft of these criteria in the future, and are excited to learn from others on ways to collectively improve our work.

Our system of accreditation

In terms of accreditation and third-party verification related to our pledge, we are currently:
- Using 3rd party accreditation for our carbon projects, using leading internationally recognized standards and registries such as VERRA, CCB, CAR, and Gold Standard;
- Undergoing 3rd party limited assurance for certain sustainability claims, for which our carbon credits are used;
- Listing all of our grant-funded forestry projects at trees.salesforce.com, which denotes polygons where our funds are being used by partner organizations. Overtime, all of these projects will use Plant for the Planet‘s TreeMapper app, enabling potential independent analyses of results over time. While not an accreditation or third party verification system, combined the polygons and the TreeMapper app will significantly add to the transparency of our grant-funded forestry projects.

In addition to the above on-going activities, we also hope to:
- Visit some projects we support with third party on-the-ground reviews, once it is COVID safe;
- Work with new earth observation organizations and others to independently verify claims related to trees and associated social and environmental metrics;
- Explore ways with the 1t.org community to bring additional rigor and best-practices related to accreditation, verification, and auditing for forestry projects.

Our partners

Plant for the Planet, American Forests, Arbor Day Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, Natural Capital Partners, Cool Effect, Greenfleet, National Forest Foundation, Global Forest Generation, Growing Trees Network, One Tree Planted, Eden Reforestation, and others are being added regularly.

Our locations

We are working at locations across Australia, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Kenya, Madagascar, Peru, Tanzania, Uganda, United Kingdom (UK), United States of America (USA), and Zambia.

We count progress towards our goal to support 100M trees from the projects listed at https://trees.salesforce.com/ which are in the following countries: United States (12), Madagascar (2), Scotland (2), Tanzania, Kenya, Australia, Peru, Denmark, Uganda, Ireland, Canada, and Zambia.