Amazon Cloud Technology launches carbon footprint tools to help customers around the world reduce their carbon footprint

Amazon Cloud Technology announced the launch of a new carbon footprint tool to build sustainable businesses for customers. By using this tool, customers can easily understand how using Amazon Cloud Technology can reduce their carbon footprint and how it compares to on-premises solutions.

Using easy-to-understand visualizations, the new tool shows customers their historical carbon footprint, assesses carbon trends based on changes in customer usage, estimates how much carbon they'll reduce by replacing their local data centers with Amazon Cloud Technology, and is able to estimate future carbon emissions based on current usage. With Amazon achieving 100% renewable energy operations by 2025, five years ahead of its original 2030 target and net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, the tool will show trends in how carbon emissions are changing for customers.

Nat Sahlstrom, Head of Energy Industry at Amazon, said: "We continue to deliver on our commitment to The Climate Pledge, and as we strive to achieve net zero carbon emissions, we want to provide our customers with the data they need to measure their carbon footprint and meet their carbon reduction targets. The Customer Carbon Footprint tool makes carbon emissions information easy for customers and encourages businesses to accelerate the development of goals, plans and programs to address the urgency of climate change. ”

The launch of the Customer Carbon Footprint Tool is part of Amazon's commitment to the Climate Declaration. Amazon co-launched the pledge in 2019 as the first signatory and expects to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040, 10 years ahead of schedule for the Paris Agreement. The signatories to the pledge agreed to measure and report greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis, and Amazon Cloud Technologies' new carbon emissions tool helps customers meet their signatory obligations by providing emissions data that makes it easy for them to incorporate it into their annual reports.

How the Carbon Footprint tool works

Customers migrate workloads from on-premises data centers to Amazon Cloud Technologies for many reasons, such as saving money, accelerating innovation, or making operations more sustainable. In many cases, migrating to Amazon Cloud Technology is more sustainable than deploying solutions on-premises. According to a market research firm 451 study, Amazon Cloud technology can currently reduce the carbon footprint of customers by nearly 80% compared to the enterprise data centers surveyed in several geographic regions, and once Amazon Cloud Technology uses 100% renewable energy to power by 2025, the carbon emissions reduction will be as high as 96%.

With this new tool, customers who have set carbon reduction targets can more accurately measure emissions associated with using Amazon Cloud Technology. The Customer Carbon Footprint Tool reports on a customer's corporate emissions, including their carbon emissions when using Amazon Cloud Technology, and provides data to demonstrate progress toward future emission reduction goals.

In addition, the tool provides historical carbon footprint data based on customers' use of Amazon Cloud Technology since January 2020, including primary and secondary carbon emissions. Tier 1 carbon emissions come directly from energy consumed by corporate operations, such as Amazon's cloud technology data centers, while tier 2 carbon emissions come from purchasing energy, such as electricity for Amazon facilities. The tool's carbon measurement unit is the industry standard metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCO2e). It is "equivalent" because there are multiple greenhouse gases (such as methane and nitrous oxide) that measure the amount of carbon that converts greenhouse gases into equivalent warming.

Customers' carbon footprint tools are shared through the Amazon Cloud Technology billing console and use carbon data that broadly meets the international standards of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which provides the world's most widely used greenhouse gas calculation standard. After logging in to the Amazon Cloud Technology billing console, customers can view carbon emissions data based on geographic location and Amazon Cloud Technologies services, such as Elastic Scaling, Secure, and Highly Available Cloud Server Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, a massively scalable object storage service in the cloud. As they deploy new resources in the cloud, they can also measure how their carbon footprint changes over time.

Customers such as Salesforce have pioneered the use of the tool

Amazon Cloud Technologies has partnered with a range of customers to test and develop customer carbon footprint tools, including Pinterest, cloud computing software company Turbonomic, resource optimization management company Veolia, cloud computing company Workday, and software service provider Salesforce.

The data provided by Amazon Cloud Technologies to Salesforce helps the company understand its climate impact and enables it to develop plans to avoid, reduce, and compensate for carbon emissions. Salesforce is a signatory to the Climate Declaration and, along with Amazon, is a founding member of the Accelerated Forest Financing And Emissions Reduction Coalition (LEAF). The coalition recently achieved its goal of providing $1 billion in public and private funding to protect tropical forests around the world.

Patrick Flynn, senior vice president and global head of sustainability at Salesforce, said: "The improved Amazon Cloud Technology carbon footprint data helps us develop better strategies and take better actions to avoid and reduce emissions. I'm excited that Amazon Cloud Technology is providing more and more data on usage and making the tool available to all customers. As we continue to co-innovate and Amazon Cloud Technologies continues to make progress towards achieving renewable energy and net zero carbon commitments, we look forward to seeing a decrease in the carbon intensity associated with using Amazon Cloud Technologies services." ”

Mia Ketterling, Workplace Sustainability Manager at Spelling Fun, also highlighted the benefits of the carbon footprint tool: "A clear understanding of emission sources is key to any company building an emissions reduction program. We're excited to use our customer carbon footprint tools to help understand our footprint, reduce the impact of our operations, and create a unique company's sustainability program. The Carbon Footprint Tool joins a collection of other Amazon Cloud Technologies tools, including the Well-Architected Sustainability Pillar of Amazon Cloud Technology's Good Architecture and the Amazon Cloud Computing Optimizer, which helps customers improve performance, reduce costs, and minimize their carbon footprint.