NASA, Canary Islands and SAP
NASA’s Earth Observatory is hosting the second annual Tournament Earth, a reader-driven competition to choose the previous year’s top NASA image of our planet.
The Canary Islands are making a return trip to the tournament in 2014, landing the No. 2 seed in the art bracket.
Why a return trip? Because nearly 60,000 votes were cast in the 2013 tournament, when an image of a submarine volcanic eruption near El Hierro, off the coast of western Africa, emerged as the champion
El Hierro, with a population of 11,000, is the smallest and farthest south and west of the Canary Islands (an Autonomous Community of Spain), in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. On 2000, El Hierro was declared Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO.
The next month of July ‘El Hierro 100% Renewable Energies’ Project will make this island to become the first in Europe to be supplied with renewable energies, according with the President of the El Hierro Island Council, Tomas Padrón
Padrón told TIME. “At first, it was simply an issue of becoming more self-sufficient,” “We were completely dependent on outside deliveries and could be cut off at a moment’s notice. But then with the global energy crisis, and climate change, and everything else that’s happened, we’ve realized it has a lot more value.”
El Hierro, NASA tournament and its beautiful photos came to my mind when that the company I work for, SAP, announced last week that it will power all its data centers and facilities globally with 100 percent renewable electricity starting in 2014. The shift will help minimize the company’s carbon footprint as it moves to a cloud business model, and will help eliminate carbon emissions caused by its customers’ systems by moving them into a green cloud.
With this initiative, SAP is reiterating its commitment to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from operations to levels of the year 2000 by 2020.
As Peter Graf, SAP chief sustainability officer, said “Committing to 100 percent renewable electricity in our data centers and facilities is a natural consequence of our business model shift into the cloud. By delivering our industry-leading cloud solutions in an environmentally friendly fashion, we expand our competitiveness in the cloud software market while further enhancing our sustainability leadership. It’s a beautiful example of how SAP puts sustainability at the core of its value creation.”
So, let´s go renewable. And please, help Canary Islands to win its second annual Tournament Earth…:)
P.S:
To vote in Tournament Earth, go to: