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 emissions for its operations globally and delivers customers a carbon neutral cloud. 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 support and mobilize 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 over 43 million trees. Our current projects are visible here, and we plan to continue expanding our work globally to reach our 100 million trees goal 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.

For reforestation projects we support through grant funding, we also encourage them to conserve and maintain these forests over time. In addition to this conservation of funded forestry projects, we primarily support tree and forest conservation through our carbon credit purchases. Salesforce has been purchasing carbon credits from forestry projects since 2017. We are currently working with a range of partners to translate carbon credit purchases into credible and conservative numbers of trees conserved which can then count towards our 100M tree goal.

To support the highest quality carbon projects, we use international best practices and guidance. We also rely on the advice of qualified experts and organizations with expertise in carbon accounting, social and environmental co-benefits and safeguards. We use our own internal criteria for selecting carbon projects. These criteria currently include: the strength of underlying standards and methodologies; financial, legal and common practice additionality tests; the quality and transparency of the baseline/reference scenarios; transparent and accurate reporting; risks and leakage assessments, mitigation, and insurance/buffer pools; community participation, benefits and protections; expected longevity of climate benefits; environmental and ecosystem co-benefits and safeguards; quality, resolution and usefulness of monitoring systems; potential to scale climate solutions; and potential to use story-telling and communications to grow and improve the climate change and trillion tree movement.

Salesforce lists the reforestation projects we support and are counting towards our 100M tree goal at https://trees.salesforce.com/. As of summer 2021, we have committed to provide funding for 13+ million trees, through 20+ projects and a dozen partner organizations. These projects have varying implementation timelines and approaches.