Microsoft’s sustainability report is coming to life and is moving beyond just pictures and words on a webpage. That’s thanks to the folks at Mojang, who have released a super cool, and free, city map that allows students and educators to explore the goals and themes of sustainability.
Available as a download on the Minecraft Marketplace Education Collection as well as within Minecraft: Education Edition, there are six specific lessons that are themed towards sustainability. The lessons cover themes such as food production, water outflow and treatment, recycling, forests, sustainable homes, and hydropower and wind farms. Mojang describes them as follows.
- Sustainable Food Production: Explore sustainable practices for every step of food production by visiting a farm, grocery store, waste facility, and recycling plant.
- Outflow Order: Learn about water outflow and treatment to understand how biosolids contribute to fertilizer and how treated water returns to their homes.
- Wasted to Wanted: Check out a landfill, and learn which materials are recyclable and what happens to materials that aren’t reused.
- Dependable Forests: Better understand the social, economic, and environmental impacts of responsible forestry.
- Sustainable Home: Visit a home built with sustainable materials to learn how to live more energy-efficiently.
- Alternative Energy: Make a trip to a hydropower plant to learn about power lines and wind power through turbines.
As a reminder, there are a couple of important figures to note in Microsoft’s sustainability efforts. Microsoft intends to be carbon negative by 2030. Microsoft also wants to be water positive by 2030 and wants to be zero waste across its direct footprint by 2030. The company is even working to build a Planetary Computer, which it says can provide access to critical environmental datasets and AI.
