Alibaba Group has recently released its FY2024 Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) report, detailing its significant strides in sustainability and inclusivity. The report provides a comprehensive view of the company’s progress towards carbon neutrality across Scopes 1, 2, 3, and 3+, along with its efforts to foster an inclusive development environment for all its stakeholders, from consumers to small businesses.
In a statement, Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu emphasized that ESG activities have been a defining part of Alibaba‘s identity since its inception 25 years ago. He stated, “Over the past 25 years, our ESG-related activities have shaped the essence of Alibaba and are as equally important to Alibaba as the creation of business value.” Wu also reaffirmed the company’s commitment to ESG as a central strategy, alongside its ‘user first’ and ‘AI-driven’ business strategies.
The report highlights Alibaba‘s substantial progress towards its carbon neutrality targets. The company managed to reduce its operational greenhouse gas emissions (Scopes 1 & 2) to 4,449,171 tons, marking a 5% decrease year on year. Furthermore, the net GHG emissions intensity within Alibaba‘s value chain (Scope 3) saw a 7% reduction, bringing it down to 8.1 tons per million RMB of revenue.
Alibaba also reported significant emissions reductions within its platform ecosystem (Scope 3+), achieving 33,337,734 tons of emissions reduction, a 45.5% increase year on year. Clean electricity accounted for 39% of Alibaba Group’s total electricity consumption, up 11.8 percentage points from the previous year. These efforts led to Alibaba Group being recognized as the top buyer across all industries on BloombergNEF’s list of China’s Top Clean Energy Buyers and Sellers in 2023.
In addition to its environmental efforts, Alibaba has also been active in promoting inclusivity through digital innovation. The company’s DAMO Academy, in collaboration with leading global medical institutions, developed an AI model for early-stage pancreatic cancer detection. The model has achieved a sensitivity of 92.9% and a specificity of 99.9%, demonstrating the potential of AI in medical diagnostics.
Alibaba has also made strides in enhancing accessibility for visually impaired individuals. More than 260,000 visually impaired individuals have been able to shop on Taobao and Tmall platforms by listening through the Duguang Optical Character Recognition (OCR) function. Furthermore, Youku’s Barrier-free Theater and Amap’s wheelchair navigation feature have made entertainment and navigation more accessible for visually impaired viewers and wheelchair users, respectively.
Alibaba Cloud has also been instrumental in democratizing AI technologies for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). The company’s open-source AI community, ModelScope, offers over 3,800 open-source models for developers. This initiative, along with others, has allowed more than 2.2 million companies and organizations to use AI tools on the DingTalk platform, and over 360,000 merchants have utilized AI productivity tools from the Wanxiang Lab under Taobao and Tmall’s Alimama.
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