Amazon's scientific approach to meeting – and measuring – its climate goals
Urgent actions — major investments and innovations — are needed across virtually every business sector to respond to climate change. In September 2019, Amazon and Global Optimism co-founded The Climate Pledge, a commitment to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 – 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement.
Reaching this goal means measuring emissions, setting aggressive reduction targets based in science, and investing in transformative decarbonization solutions. Amazon joined the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) to align our decarbonization goals with the best available science, and measures and reports carbon emissions following the GHG Protocol and an independent verification process.
The most aggregate metric used to report emissions is total — or absolute — emissions. For a complex company like Amazon, even this “absolute” metric is complicated to calculate. And the aggregate, company-wide carbon number does not tell the full story of the company’s performance, or provide the insights needed by businesses and individual teams to drive decarbonization initiatives. To help gain deeper insights, Amazon also tracks carbon intensity per dollar of gross merchandise sales (GMS), and more detailed metrics for individual business units.
High-growth companies such as Amazon need to measure their carbon intensity to track, in detail, whether they are making the right investments needed to decarbonize a business, and to decouple their business growth from greenhouse gas emissions. As companies invest in new products and services, the metric should not be whether the company’s footprint simply shrank, but whether and how fast it is lowering its carbon intensity and decoupling business operations from carbon emissions.
