Salesforce announces the Step Up Declaration, signed by an alliance of 21 companies including Uber, HP, and Lyft, pledging to use tech to fight climate change
Natasha Bach / Fortune :
Context & Ripple Effects
The Step Up Declaration is Salesforce's second attempt in a year at convening a cross-industry coalition — Uber had already joined it in the Coalition for the American Dream lobbying group with Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and IBM. This time the shared cause is climate, and the pledge is to deploy each company's own technology against it.
The declaration also fits an emerging playbook of voluntary corporate climate commitments: a year later Salesforce would commercialize its in-house emissions tracking as Sustainability Cloud, and by late 2020 Amazon was scaling its own Climate Pledge by recruiting Microsoft, Unilever, and others — turning pledge membership itself into a competitive arena.
First-order effects
- Uber, HP, Lyft, and the other 18 signatories publicly bind their brands to measurable climate action via technology, handing Salesforce convener status and reputational credit among its enterprise customers.
Second-order effects
- Salesforce converts the coalition into product strategy: the internal tooling behind such pledges becomes Sustainability Cloud, sold back to the same market of companies that need to report their footprints.
Third-order effects
- Voluntary, CEO-signed declarations harden into the industry's default governance mechanism for climate — a template Salesforce itself reuses when it signs the White House's voluntary AI pledge alongside Nvidia, IBM, and Palantir in 2023.
The trend: Tech climate action is consolidating around branded, vendor-convened pledge coalitions that double as product and influence platforms, from Salesforce's declaration to Amazon's Climate Pledge.