In a step towards combating climate change, Microsoft launched the Microsoft Climate Research Initiative, a research project to focus on carbon reduction and removal, carbon accounting and environmental resilience. The announcement was made in a blogpost earlier this week. 

Announced in a blogpost made on Wednesday, the project currently is working on nine projects that are tracking carbon emissions from cement as well as monitoring carbon dioxide.

Once complete, the results of the nine projects will be available to the public free of charge. A company spokesperson told Reuters over email that the projects were collaborations between company experts as well as academics to create an “opportunity to drive high impact” using “computational tools” and “specific domain expertise.” Prior to the announcement of the Initiative, some researchers, like Elftheria Roumeli of the University of Washington, were already working with Microsoft on some of its own projects.

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Roumeli, a researcher at the University of Washington, for example, was working with Microsoft’s Bichlien Nguyen examining the environmental footprint of sustainable materials at Project Zerix. As part of the Climate Research Initiative, Roumeli is working on looking at how to reduce the environmental threat that concrete presents. She says that the cement industry accounts for 5-8% of the carbon dioxide emissions.

The concrete industry accounts for 5-8% of global carbon dioxide emissions, the bulk of which can be attributed to cement, Roumeli told Bloomberg. The company said that it was aiming to be carbon negative by the end of the decade. 

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The move comes soon after Google announced its own attempts to fight climate change. Alphabet’s golden goose announced earlier this week that it would be making its Google Earth Engine free for corporate entities and governments. The data points pulled by the Earth Engine were earlier available only to academics and non-profits. It had already run a trial with a US consumer chemicals company which was tracking mosquito populations across the world using the Earth Engine.