Tag: sustainability

Can you see sounds? Using open data, you can. To celebrate this year’s World Oceans Day, an artist and sustainability application architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS), created an artwork titled Can You See the Sound of the Ocean. To create the art, she drew inspiration from the Pacific Ocean Sound Recordings from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), available through the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI). Learn more about the dataset and the art work.

With increasing pressure from climate change, loss of biodiversity, and demand for natural resources from already stressed ecosystems, it has become essential to understand and address environmental changes by making sustainable land use decisions with the latest and most accurate data. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), AWS invited Joe Sexton, chief scientist and co-founder of terraPulse, to share how AWS technologies and open data are supporting terraPulse’s efforts to provide accurate and up-to-date information on the world’s changing ecosystems.

AWS is pleased to officially announce the innovative startups chosen to participate in the AWS Sustainable Cities Accelerator. These selected startups are developing groundbreaking solutions to help cities address sustainability challenges, like tackling traffic analysis, smart internet of things (IoT) lampposts, and much more. AWS launched the Sustainable Cities Accelerator program in March to help address the crucial need for innovation and collaborative solutions to address global climate and clean tech challenges. The 12 finalists in the cohort originate from four countries across North America, Latin America, and Europe, and represent a wide-range of innovative sustainable solutions.

The theme of this year’s Earth Day is “Invest in our planet.” In celebration of this year’s theme, we want to highlight the important sustainability work featured in the AWS documentary series, Climate Next, which explores the ways organizations and communities in four distinct regions are investing in cloud-powered solutions to fight climate change.

Open data is helping researchers and nonprofit conservationists protect vulnerable species around the world. In celebration of Earth Day, we are shining a spotlight on two sustainability stories from the AWS Fix This podcast from AWS, a podcast exploring the ways people use technology to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

Today marks World Health Day, and this year’s theme is “Our planet, our health.” The World Health Organization (WHO) is using this day to drive global attention to the urgent actions needed to protect our planet and prioritize well-being in societies, and supporting these efforts is core to our principles and values at AWS. We’re proud to support our customers and partners who are solving some of society’s biggest problems with the cloud to make these ideas and changes a reality. Here are just a few examples of how our customers are leveraging AWS technology to innovate for our planet and our health.

On March 31, the AWS Summit Brussels returned to the Egg in Brussels, Belgium, where Max Peterson, vice president of AWS worldwide public sector, and Isabella Groeger-Cechowicz, vice president of AWS worldwide public sector of EMEA sales, took the stage for the event’s keynote. They discussed how AWS is supporting customers with a dedication to data privacy and protection, sustainability, and social impact. Three customer speakers joined them onstage to share stories about how they use the cloud to drive impact for their missions. Read on for what you might have missed at the AWS Summit Brussels.

As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), AWS invited Nils Helset, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of DigiFarm, to share how AWS Cloud technology and open data support DigiFarm’s efforts in precision farming to make agricultural practices more sustainable and efficient.

In 2021, AWS launched the Clean Energy Accelerator to help startups working in clean energy accelerate their impact. This accelerator resulted in funding and growth opportunities for the participating startups. Building off this success, AWS is now launching a new accelerator focused on the rapid growth of clean tech innovations: the AWS Sustainable Cities Accelerator. The new accelerator will focus on mobility and transportation with a goal helping companies learn how to innovate and accelerate their mission growth by leveraging advanced cloud-based technologies.

The AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program makes high-value, cloud-optimized datasets publicly available on AWS. We work with data providers to democratize access to data by making it available to the public for analysis on AWS; to develop new cloud-native techniques, formats, and tools that lower the cost of working with data; and to encourage the development of communities that benefit from access to shared datasets. This quarter, we released 19 new or updated datasets like validated OpenStreetMap data, bioacoustic data, COVID-19 detection data, and more.