How Amazon Is Driving Sustainability With Clean Energy, AI And Data

As part of the lead-up to the Innovation Day at AWS Summit Online EMEA event, I spoke to Neil Harris, Principle Sustainability Strategy and Innovation at AWS, about their sustainability programs. Amazon is the world’s biggest corporate buyer of renewable energy and needs to ensure sustainability is at the heart of all of its operations in order to meet its carbon emission targets. The tech conglomerate aims to become net carbon neutral by 2040 and is a founding signatory of The Climate Pledge, a pact between some of the world’s biggest organizations pledging that they will work together to beat the targets set by the Paris Climate Agreement by 10 years.

As part of this commitment to sustainability the company unveiled nine new wind and solar energy projects across the US, Canada and Europe this year. In total, they will generate 8.5GW of energy from 206 projects worldwide, and they will power its warehousing and distribution fulfilment network, as well as its data centers, corporate premises and bricks ‘n’ mortar retail stores. Going beyond this, it also will provide for the energy used in people’s homes to power devices like Echo and Fire TV. This is because it calculates that this domestic energy accounts for around half of the energy footprint that electronics devices consume during their manufacture, distribution and lifetime.

Sustainability is a vital consideration for every business today as the damage that will be caused – not just to the economy but to our way of life on the planet – if we don’t reduce carbon emissions is well established. One study estimates that we are on course to losing between 2% and 10% of GDP every year to the effects of climate change. So it was great to get the chance to talk to Neil Harris, sustainable strategy and innovation lead at AWS, and a speaker at Innovation Day during AWS Summit Online event, about some of the initiatives underway at the world’s largest retailer.

We spoke about how an important element of Amazon’s strategy is to work with its one-million-plus AWS business customers to help them tackle their own sustainability challenges. As well as ensuring the services it supplies to them are powered using clean energy, it helps them to build agile and efficient processes that further reduce their energy footprints.

He tells me “We hear all the time that sustainability is difficult – it’s one thing to declare a goal but another to put the right investments and processes in place. So one of the ways we … help our customers as much as we can, is to really simplify some of the complexities of sustainability, and often that comes from data.”

In other words, organizations need data in order to be able to make decisions around finding the most sustainable ways of working, and creating processes that are highly energy efficient. As Harris also points out during our discussion, “The cleanest energy there is, is energy that you don’t use!”

By helping businesses to understand how to find that data, and providing them with tools that let them analyze it put insights into action, Amazon hopes to pass on what it has learned to all companies working in its ecosystem. Clearly this has the potential to have a big impact on the commitments made by industry towards hitting climate goals.

An example of this is a new flight efficiency modelling system recently unveiled by airline Qantas. Built on AWS and in collaboration with the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney, the AI-enabled platform allows Qantas to determine the most efficient flight paths for air travel more accurately than ever before. This leads to massive reduction in the amount of fuel burned by the aircraft in flight, and consequently dramatically lower levels of carbon emission – by around 50 million kgs of carbon emitted each year.

Another initiative launched by Amazon this year is the sustainability bond. These are bonds used to fund projects globally around renewable energy, clean transport, sustainable buildings, affordable housing initiatives and socioeconomic growth. The company has also purchased over 100,000 fully electric vehicles to build out its green delivery network, from US manufacturer Rivian, to operate alongside those it has already purchased from Mercedes Benz and Mahindra Electric. Harris tells me “I think that’s a great move towards electric logistics and delivery but it’s also a signal to the market – we want others to follow on this pathway. We know we’re not alone, there is some fantastic innovation out there and companies are really stepping up.

“The investments … and commitments we make hopefully provide confidence for the sectors we operate in, so we see more of this transition happening.”

As well as environmental benefits, there are clearly huge business benefits. From a networking point of view alone, companies are increasingly holding their suppliers and partnered organizations to account, and funds and financial institutions look to sustainability as a key requirement for investment. “This can have a very real financial return, in the near-term, in terms of the shape of your business, let alone the brand, the talent, the growth opportunities…” Harris says.

As someone who has built his career around sustainability, Harris looks towards a future where people in his role are no longer needed. This will come when working towards sustainable goals is second-nature to everyone, no matter what their role is in the business. In my opinion, it’s harder to think of a more important target that any company can work towards. Tools like cloud computing, data analytics and AI give us powerful tools for making this change, and it’s the responsibility of every business leader to make sure they’re being used to their full capacity.

To find out more about Amazon’s sustainability initiatives, you can register for Innovation Day at #AWSSummit Online’ event here. You can watch the full conversation between Neil Harris and myself below:

For more on the topic of artificial intelligence, have a look at my book ‘The Intelligence Revolution: Transforming Your Business With AI’.

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About Bernard Marr

Bernard Marr is a world-renowned futurist, influencer and thought leader in the field of business and technology. He is the author of 18 best-selling books, writes a regular column for Forbes and advises and coaches many of the world’s best-known organisations. He has over 2 million social media followers and was ranked by LinkedIn as one of the top 5 business influencers in the world and the No 1 influencer in the UK.