Climate Connections
Climate change is a primary driver of numerous calamities including floods, fires, diseases, droughts, and even ecosystem collapse. These disasters pose significant risks to human health and wellbeing, especially for our most vulnerable communities.
Indeed, Adam Selipsky, former CEO of AWS, has called climate change the issue of our generation. Yet individuals and organizations are rising to the challenge and working to monitor and forecast climate change, mitigate its impact, and find solutions. To build these solutions, people need access to the best available data, science, and technology.
That’s where AWS comes into the picture. As a global cloud service provider, AWS provides on-demand digital technologies that enable public and private actors to share and analyze data in a more collaborative way. Together, these stakeholders can use the cloud to develop solutions that can make society more resilient and reduce risks to health, economy, infrastructure, and the environment.
► Download the ebook: Climate Connections
How AWS helps organizations with climate change
Our Climate Connections eBook shows how AWS is helping organizations tackle climate change at scale. Here are some highlights from four of the seven key areas discussed in the eBook:
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Environment and natural resources
Climate change threatens natural resources such as water, forests, and wildlife that sustain our way of life. The degradation and loss of these resources affects all of us – which means that every community should have access to the climate data it needs to be part of the solution.
AWS Cloud democratizes data and analytics, making it possible for all sorts of organizations to access and process high-quality open data sets so they can forecast harmful events (such as forest fires), assess land degradation, and find the most effective ways to restore ecosystems with an eye toward achieving environmental justice.
The cloud also provides a platform for modelers to run analyses and evaluate risks as climate change amps up the frequency and severity of natural disasters. For instance, modelers can use AWS to see how coastlines will change and plan how to protect lives and property as storm surges, floods and wildfires become more frequent.
In order to better manage climate challenges, organizations need to tackle skill shortages when it comes to gathering, cleaning, and analyzing climate data. AWS is committed to closing this skills gap through high-quality education and training programs, as well as data modeling platforms that enable analysts to build machine learning (ML) models using point-and-click interfaces without having to write code.
"The complexity of climate change requires an inclusive, interdisciplinary approach. Organizations can start by democratizing tools, data, and science with the cloud, helping bring more people into the climate discussion."
— Ana Pinheiro Privette, Global Lead of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative
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Smart cities and buildings
In 2020, the United Nations Development Program estimated that cities account for 70% of global GHG emissions. With urban populations expected to increase over the next few decades, cities will need smart buildings and public infrastructure to become more efficient and resilient.
Smart city initiatives typically depend on large amounts of data collected through mobile networks and analyzed automatically. AWS offers cities powerful tools so they can monitor, manage, and model smart infrastructure solutions using digital twin technology, hyper-localized 5G capabilities, and IoT integrations.
Climate change often has the greatest impact on those communities with the fewest resources. That’s why AWS Innovation Studio has partnered with organizations like the Resilient Cities Network and the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown University to show how cloud-based data analytics can lead to climate solutions that produce fairer and more equitable outcomes for all communities.
On a more granular level, AWS can help building managers improve efficiency and sustainability by collecting data from IoT sensors, analyzing that information using AI/ML services, and tracking KPIs on easy-to-read dashboards. Indeed, Amazon itself uses AWS in this way to improve sustainability at over 350 fulfillment centers and get closer to The Climate Pledge commitment of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
"Collaborating with the AWS Innovation Studio is an opportunity for our global, city-led network to co-develop and share resilience solutions so an exponential number of communities benefit."
—Lauren Sorkin, Executive Director, Resilient Cities Network
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Utilities and power
Energy use is a huge contributor to total GHG, which has driven governments around the world from Australia to Europe and the UK to invest heavily in deriving power from clean energy sources. With its new clean energy directives, the US federal government aims seeks to leverage its scale and procurement power in order to eliminate carbon pollution from the nation’s energy sector by 2035.1
As energy grids become more complex with the integration of significant generating capacity from renewable sources, AWS can help increase grid resiliency, simplify management, and improve availability of essential systems.
The cloud integrates data analytics, high performance computing, graph networks, and AI/ML models to enable faster and less expensive grid simulations, as well as more accurate predictions of energy use and demand.
For example, GE Renewable Energy has used AWS to manage IoT data from over 40,000 assets spread across more than 35 countries. This partnership helped GE improve its system availability from 89-92% to 99.9%.2
1. Fact Sheet: President Biden Signs Executive Order Catalyzing America’s Clean Energy Economy Through Federal Sustainability | The White House.
2. GE Renewable Energy’s Digital Services Platform Achieves 99.9% Data Availability on AWS
“The future is collaboration with customers. Collaboration with AWS is incredibly valuable for our platform as we consider the future of innovation.”
—Steve Deskevich, VP of Product Management at GE Digital
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Finance
Governments are developing new regulations to direct capital toward building more sustainable economies. At the same time, public and private sectors face serious challenges in calculating the financial impact of climate risks and integrating ESG metrics into their investment, lending, and underwriting decisions.
Cloud computing can help stakeholders surmount these challenges. Modelers can use petabyte-scale open-source climate data hosted by AWS to manage climate finance risks and investment strategies. Organizations can then clean, process, and integrate this data into custom ESG scoring models. The scores emerging from these models can be tested and validated using ML techniques.
Supply chain disruptions and inefficiencies can also cause major financial problems for public and private sector enterprises. Consider, for instance, how an estimated one-third of total global food production is lost or wasted, in part due to inefficient distribution systems.3
AWS underpins cloud-based supply chain solutions that improve visibility and real-time monitoring. In the agricultural sector, this sort of transparency can help both with measuring Scope 3 emissions and also with reducing waste by ensuring that perishable goods are properly kept safe in cold chains from producer to consumer.
"With AWS, you can achieve the scalability and agility you need to power through your climate risk management and innovation journey."
—Xiaochen Zhang, Global Head of Innovation and GTM, AWS
Bringing the planet together
More on sustainability & ESG
Total results: 24
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ebook
Practical Sustainability for Business
Adopting a more holistic approach to sustainabilitySustainability is a business imperative. Organizations can’t succeed when ecologies are failing or societies are degrading; in order for business to thrive, so too must the planet. Business success is inextricably tied to sustainable practices, but becoming a sustainable business doesn’t happen overnight. In this ebook, learn practical ways you can implement sustainability realistically and impactfully.
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Article
The power of prediction: How modeling the future can help increase sustainability
Using predictive modeling, organizations are forecasting the future to help governments, businesses, and communities find opportunities to prevent environmental damage as well as economic and human loss.A United Nations report, released in September 2022, revealed that greenhouse gas concentrations are rising to record highs, and climate change-related disasters, like hurricanes and floods, have increased five times over the last 50 years, killing an average of 115 people per day. The UN report also emphasized the importance of providing “early warnings [to] save lives and livelihoods from climate threats.” AWS customers around the world are working to do just that. Using predictive modeling, organizations are forecasting the future to help governments, businesses, and communities find opportunities to prevent environmental damage as well as economic and human loss.
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Article
Cloud Technology Helps Scientists Move Faster to Save Endangered Species (RONIN)
Researchers at the University of Sydney are building a digitized genomic library to meet Australia’s conservation goals.At the University of Sydney’s Australasian Wildlife Genomics Group, Senior Research Manager Dr. Carolyn Hogg is creating a genomic legacy database and an online tool to assist with conservation efforts and breeding programs for Australia’s threatened species. The technology is accessible to conservation managers and researchers around the world and allows Dr. Hogg’s team to manage a massive amount of data on a small research budget, focus its energy on analytics (not IT), and move with the urgency that climate change demands.
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Video
How AI and the Cloud Help Reduce Hunger and Food Waste
How AI assists in the reduction of hunger.See how Peak, an AI company, is helping FareShare, a food redistribution charity, provide millions of meals to vulnerable people by managing the food supply chain and more effectively predicting donations. Powered by the AWS cloud with Intel technologies.
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Article
How five key industries use AI, machine learning and the cloud to meet their sustainability goals
Technology innovation is helping some of the largest producers of greenhouse gases to drastically cut emissions. Learn how they’re doing it.Reducing carbon emissions usually comes down to achieving greater efficiency in the use of energy and materials. Improving efficiency requires detailed mapping and monitoring of very complex systems such as factories, electrical grids, HVAC systems and logistics routings. Increasingly, these environments are outfitted with sensors, and artificial intelligence excels at finding patterns in the huge amounts of data that these sensors collect, says Bratin Saha, vice president of machine learning services at Amazon.
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ebook
Fighting Climate Change with the Cloud
Our Climate Connections eBook shows how AWS is helping organizations tackle climate change at scaleClimate change is a primary driver of numerous calamities including floods, fires, diseases, droughts, and even ecosystem collapse. These disasters pose significant risks to human health and wellbeing, especially for our most vulnerable communities. Indeed, Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS has called climate change the issue of our generation. Yet individuals and organizations are rising to the challenge and working to monitor and forecast climate change, mitigate its impact, and find solutions. To build these solutions, people need access to the best available data, science, and technology.