Cisco plans to focus its environmental sustainability investments on meeting its 2025 goal to reduce the vendor's scope 1 and 2 emissions by 90%.

"This is really looking to source long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) to create new renewable capacity in the grid," the networking giant's recently appointed Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) Mary de Wysocki said.

"I feel like it's been fast and furious," she said to describe her transition from VP of corporate affairs to CSO. She told SDxCentral the creation of this office will allow Cisco to "really channel the demand [and] channel the enthusiasm driving the integration" of this sustainability office into the company.

To that point, the networking vendor has increased the overall number of individuals fully dedicated to driving sustainability across different areas of the company, including in sales, business development, and education.

Cisco's customers always wants to "talk about cost, reliability and security," but sustainability areas like power consumption are an increasingly significant customer concern. "We're seeing more and more RFPs [requests for proposals] coming in looking for us to understand what are the commitments we're making? How are we achieving the different goals year over year?" de Wysocki said.

One of de Wysocki's focuses as CSO will be strategizing Cisco's sequencing of investment to "connect the dots between our net-zero commitment as well as the customer solutions that are going to help our customers hit theirs," along with assessing the impact of circular design and circular economy principles on net-zero goals.

She described large parts of her role as harnessing the excitement within the company, pulling everyone together, fostering an integrated sustainability strategy, and identifying the individuals in each function who will be driving their team's sustainability strategy.

"But part of the role is just really capturing this moment in time and accelerating the strategy development, the ability to create milestones, the ability to create scenarios of what we could do now that might have near-term impact, or what we might want to invest in now that we're going to see the fruits of, or the benefit, in 2030, 2040," de Wysocki added.

The vendor's 2040 net-zero goal was recently approved by the Science Based Targets initiative's (SBTi) framework for aligning corporate net-zero ambitions with climate science. "We know we need to innovate with passion and trust science," de Wysocki explained in a blog post.

An SBTi validation requires that a company's strategy to reach net-zero includes at least 90% emissions reductions and no more than 10% carbon offsets. "This requirement means we can’t simply rely on carbon offsets to achieve our goal," de Wysocki explained. "We must focus the bulk of our efforts on deep emissions reductions – which we believe is the best way to reduce global warming and lessen the impacts of climate change."

Cisco aims to reach net-zero global scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2025 and net zero across all three scopes of emissions by 2040, and the vendor will begin reporting progress toward the 2040 target in its annual Purpose Report set to be released next month.