Category: Sustainability

Climate change is a significant factor in many health-related issues, from the increase of pest-related illness, to food scarcity, access to clean air and water, and beyond. Recognizing the power the cloud has to amplify technologies that mitigate many of these issues, AWS is sponsoring a new fellowship with Halcyon, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit supporting impact-driven startups. Designed for entrepreneurs seeking to build climate resilience across Latin America and the Caribbean, the Halcyon Climate Resilience Intensive Fellowship aims to combat the compounding effects of climate change on poverty, food insecurity, health disparities, and displacement.

In 2022, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) Global Hackathon, part of a new collaboration with the International Research Centre in Artificial Intelligence, under the auspices of UNESCO. Participants were asked to use their creativity, intelligence, and technical skills to build sustainability solutions using data from ASDI on any AWS Cloud services to build solutions that support one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the United Nations (UN). We connected with Jeff McWhirter, the first place winner, to learn more about his winning project, the Repository for Archiving and MAnaging Diverse Data (RAMADDA).

The AWS Sustainability Conference held in Dublin gathered public sector and commercial organisations to came together to better understand how the AWS Cloud can drive sustainability initiatives. The conference focused on the importance of sustainability in business strategy, and how organisations can leverage the power of technology to achieve their sustainability goals. Leaders at the AWS Sustainability Conference discussed key best practices to optimize for sustainability initiatives.

As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), AWS invited Seán Lynch, the founder of OpenLitterMap, to share how AWS technologies and open data are helping to solve global challenges like biodiversity loss and plastic pollution with citizen science. Solutions like OpenLitterMap help unlock the potential that a global abundance of technology has for the collection and dissemination of pertinent data that is an instrumental part of positive social change.

A new geopolitical and energy market reality has accelerated momentum for the green transition. But there is one geography for which energy is a perennial challenge: islands. Islands have always sought to create a sustainable environment for their populations and have had to use ingenuity, collaboration, and civic will to make it happen—and often by using innovative technology. In this way, islands can be viewed as living laboratories of what could be scaled up for mainland communities. As the world responds to the energy crisis, islands can show a path for overcoming energy challenges.

As part of the Registry of Open Data on AWS, AWS invited Alexander Rey, creator of Pirate Weather, to share how AWS technologies and open data are supporting his efforts to provide a no cost and open weather forecast API.

The First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research and technology group, is committed to making climate risk information accessible, simple to understand, and actionable for individuals, governments, and industry. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), AWS invited Dr. Ed Kearns, the chief data officer of First Street Foundation, to share how AWS technologies and open data are supporting their mission to provide accurate and up-to-date information on climate related risks.

My favorite part of re:Invent, this year and every year, is the opportunity it provides to hear directly from AWS Partners and customers. As always, I’m impressed by the value that partners are delivering for customers, and I’m encouraged at the opportunities ahead of us to continue innovating, simplifying, and delivering results. For any partners who weren’t able to attend on-site, I want to share what the worldwide public sector partners team is working on to better serve partners. Here are a few announcements you may have missed.

AWS announced the startups chosen to participate in the AWS Sustainable Cities Accelerator for Infrastructure. These startups are developing groundbreaking solutions to help cities address infrastructure-related sustainability challenges. Infrastructure, or the built environment, encompasses all aspects of our lives, and includes real estate, manufacturing, power, utility, and transportation systems. The nine startups in the cohort originate from four countries across North America, Latin America, and Europe, and represent a wide range of innovative sustainable solutions.

To assist the science community in conducting studies of climate change impacts at local to regional scales, NASA created the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) Global Daily Downscaled Projections (GDDP) dataset, or NEX-GDDP-CMIP6. This dataset is expected to enhance public understanding of possible future climate patterns at the spatial scale of individual towns, cities, and watersheds. It provides a set of global, high resolution, bias-corrected climate change projections that can be used to evaluate climate change impacts on processes that are sensitive to finer-scale climate gradients and the effects of local topography on climate conditions. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), this dataset is available at no cost on the Registry of Open Data.