Microsoft today introduced an environmental credit service and updates to its Cloud for Sustainability that highlight the cloud provider's focus on helping customers move past environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments to action, according to Rosie Mastrandrea, Microsoft's senior director of sustainability.

"Data is the center of that, and it's like – that's a huge nut to crack. That's the starting place for everybody," she told SDxCentral, noting Microsoft's focus on helping customers gather relevant data, measure accurately, and act on what they find.

Mastrandrea, whose background is in customer experience and product lifecycle marketing, said her personal passion for sustainability made her current role an easy choice when the opportunity arose.

"My entry into [sustainability] is regenerative agriculture and really connecting the food systems with climates and with health care systems and all of those things coming together. [I'm] really thrilled to be working on it in my day job as well," she said.

A new avenue she's helping Microsoft explore is carbon credit markets with the launch of its Environmental Credit Service (ECS). These efforts are targeted at improving the trust and transparency of environmental credit markets by building a managed service on the backend side.

"For us, the backend is really being able to identify and work with project owners who want to be able to eventually sell their credits and then also bring[ing] in the verifiers and the registries and have it all in one system," Mastrandrea explained, referencing the current lack of transparency and prevalence of double- or triple-counting in today's carbon credit markets.

"There's just not a lot of transparency," she said. "The demand for really high quality credits has gone up quite a bit, but the supply is just – it's too murky right now. And so that's the part we're really tackling." She explained other partners and companies will likely end up building marketplaces for end users that Microsoft can plug in to its ECS platform.

The credit service's transparency and trust will be founded in part on the service's distributed ledger foundation, which Mastrandrea described as a "ledge of ledgers" that's much broader than blockchain. It serves as a "master ledger of what's happening with that particular credit as it's going through its lifecycle," she explained.

Looking ahead, she suspects multiple places will exist for transparent backend credits to be created. While Microsoft will likely partner with other credit marketplaces to build a more robust ecosystem, "we'll focus on the backend," she said.