The following are remarks from Kara Hurst, Amazon’s Chief Sustainability Officer, made during her keynote speech at the European Tech For Climate Action Conference, held in Brussels on Thursday 17th October 2024.
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As Amazon's Chief Sustainability Officer, I spend my time building strategies and partnerships for us to meet The Climate Pledge, Amazon’s ambitious commitment to meet the Paris Climate Agreement ten years early and reach net-zero carbon by 2040 – globally and across all of our operations.
Today’s summit comes at an exciting time in Europe - the beginning of a new political mandate. Let’s both take stock of where we stand, and look at what we want to achieve together, to reach our common goals.
Five years ago, almost to the day, the European Union presented its Green Deal – the roadmap for making the EU's economy more sustainable by turning climate and environmental challenges into opportunities.
As a company firmly at home in the EU, with online stores in eight countries, and more than 150,000 employees in the region, we’ve been vocal in supporting the Green Deal. We know how important an enabling regulatory framework is to catalyze the transition. And the Green Deal has truly delivered in creating many mechanisms which encourage innovation, deployment, and the scaling of clean technologies - from renewable energy to zero-exhaust-emission vehicles. That’s a strong track record, for just five years.
And five years ago we also launched The Climate Pledge, which Amazon co-founded. As we work towards our 2040 net-zero carbon commitment, I’m excited to share some of our achievements so far – but I also want to use this opportunity to highlight opportunities for us all to make the green transition even faster, making Europe more competitive, and our customers happy.
Amazon is a large company – and while we see ourselves as a real needle mover, tackling climate change is all about bringing your partners along for the journey. Since 2019, more than 525 businesses and organizations across 58 industries and 45 countries have signed up to The Climate Pledge, joining forces with us in inventing and investing in the transition to a more sustainable future.
We continue to transform our transport network, with thousands of electric cargo bikes, electric vans, and even electric heavy trucks being deployed to deliver for customers across Europe. We are also going big on going micro – by doubling the number of micro-mobility hubs to more than 40, with Madrid, Rome, Vienna, and many more cities now online. These hubs are smaller, centrally located delivery stations which allow our delivery partners to deliver to our customers by e-bike.
In addition to this, we are also thrilled to have achieved our goal of matching 100% of the electricity consumed by our global operations with renewable energy in 2023 – seven years ahead of our original 2030 goal. This achievement was driven by scaling up our portfolio of renewable energy projects, which now represents over 6 GW in Europe, with projects from Ireland and Greece to Portugal and Poland. Nearly one third of this comes from six offshore wind farms, more offshore wind capacity than any other company, according to Bloomberg.
Between 2014 to 2022, we estimate our wind and solar farms have helped generate more than €2.4 billion in investment in Europe; and with more than 180 wind and solar projects in the region, Amazon is helping to provide new sources of carbon-free energy to local grids, creating jobs, and supporting local businesses.
Amazon Web Services has also been working with Wind Europe and Accenture to develop EasyPermits, a cloud solution to help speed up the permitting process of renewable energy projects, which has already been successfully tested in two Danish municipalities.
And then there’s our work with artificial intelligence and machine learning, which can help us meet our climate goals at the speed, scale, and urgency our planet requires. Take, for example, our Packaging Decision Engine – an AI model which helps determine the most efficient packaging options to ship millions of items available to Amazon customers. The model is constantly learning, and along with other packaging innovations, it has helped us to decrease our average per-shipment packaging weight by 43%, representing more than 3 million metric tons of packaging materials avoided since 2015.
We’re proud of our achievements, but we know there’s more work to be done – a lot more. So let’s now look forward.
Large companies stimulate investment in the development of green technologies and lower-carbon products and services that will be required to help companies of all sizes decarbonize their operations. The strong framework created by the EU’s Green Deal has helped to build confidence in sustainability investments across the economy and across Amazon’s value chain.
That’s why today I urge you to continue to be bold and ambitious as we take on these challenges together.
For the EU to move forward it needs competitiveness and sustainability to go hand in hand. This aligns with Amazon’s view that the EU has the opportunity to build on its Single Market and create a Sustainable Single Market – with green growth and skilled jobs, accelerated innovation, and the development of cutting-edge green technology. This will benefit Europe as a whole, the sustainability front-runners in its economy, and – equally important – our environment and EU citizens.
We should therefore implement the Green Deal without shying away from further building and creating the relevant tools which will get Europe up to speed. An ambitious EU emissions reduction target for 2040 can help accelerate investments and set a clear baseline for the development of policies which enable industry to fully contribute to decarbonization, sector by sector.
We at Amazon are hard at work investing in renewable energy production, while installing charging stations for our fleet of electric vans and trucks across the EU. On top of that, digital technologies like AI and cloud computing can help accelerate the decarbonization of the EU’s economy at speed and scale. To truly allow this shift to happen we must now align the power grid investment timeline with energy transition, and create signals to attract investment for a modern, resilient, and flexible power grid.
There is, of course, so much more to do – from shifting more freight to rail and sea, to scaling more sustainable building materials and the removal of barriers to participating in the circular economy.
At Amazon our north star is our global Climate Pledge to reach net-zero carbon by 2040, and the EU’s Green Deal has helped us accelerate along this path.
We’re hugely excited to take on this challenge – this responsibility - and to partner with you to deliver on a truly Sustainable Single Market going forward.
