How AWS helped Climate Pledge Arena with its sustainability goals

Learn how the world’s most sustainable arena relies on data and AI from AWS to meet its mission

Opened in 2021, Climate Pledge Arena (CPA) in Seattle, Washington is home to the NHL’s Seattle Kraken, the WNBA’s Seattle Storm, and the world’s biggest entertainers. It’s also one of the most sustainable arenas in the world – living up to its name. Amazon co-founded The Pledge with Global Optimism and committed to reaching net-zero carbon by 2040.

Thanks to the support and partnership from Amazon, the arena became the first net-zero arena in the world in 2023 by accomplishing the following:

• The 932,000-square-foot arena runs on 100% renewable energy, including an on-site solar array.
• The 44-million-pound roof, an architectural marvel when the building was first constructed for the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962, has been retrofitted to reduce the amount of embodied carbon.
• Its food program prioritizes local sourcing; the arena aims to source 75% of the food it serves to fans from farms within a 300-mile radius, recycles serving containers on-site, and has removed single-use plastics.
• Even the ice for the hockey rink comes from captured rainwater and the Zamboni for smoothing the ice between periods runs on an electric engine.

The work that went into becoming the world’s first net-zero arena relies on data management and measurable tracking. That means that the team at the arena has to manage a deluge of statistics and analyses such as foot traffic, carbon capture, electricity usage, merchandise sales, food sourcing, and countless metrics in between, to measure and meet their sustainability goals.

As the Director of Sustainability for Climate Pledge Arena and the Seattle Kraken, Brianna Treat leads the arena’s efforts in understanding all of this data. She’s also personally passionate about meeting the arena’s goals. She grew up on a farm in Oklahoma and as time went by, she remembers watching both the growing and harvesting seasons became more erratic. “When I got a little bit more in tune with the why—not just that the climate changes naturally, but humans are a big part of why the change is escalating—it’s really what brought me here today.”

Car and truck emissions resulting from traveling to and from the arena, Treat says, account for the highest volume of emissions for CPA. To alleviate this impact, event entrance tickets double as tickets onto any of Seattle’s public transportation systems, whether that’s using bus or light rail. “The emissions associated with travel, when they enter our doors, the food and beverage that fans buy, the waste after they finish—we’ve thought about all those systems,” Treat says.

So, how much carbon emission is saved when a fan uses a public bus instead of their own car? Or how does recycling a cup change the building’s carbon footprint? These kinds of questions translate to quantifiable numbers that are difficult for humans to calculate, especially since the numbers can change on a daily basis. This is where Amazon Web Services (AWS) entered, lending its data expertise and AI modeling to help the arena understand all its information.

“We worked with AWS on constructing an entirely new carbon dashboard dedicated specifically to arena data collection,” stated Treat. “Analyzing every system possible in the arena and setting actionable goals to keep ourselves accountable was something that had never been done before.”

Rahul Sareen, who at the time was the Global Practice Manager of Sustainability in AWS Professional Services, headed the AWS team that built the database and application Treat would eventually use. They essentially started from scratch, he says, “mapping” associations between the data points in the CPA ecosystem in order to build an effective application and travel model. For instance, the arena hosts concerts and non-sporting events, and the transportation patterns of attendees change based on the event. Sareen’s team looked back at historical traffic patterns to build the models needed for calculating the carbon footprint for each event.

“We wanted to build a streamlined user interface to make it easier for reporting,” Sareen says. “We provided the data on the frontend, so the application became an improved experience for a sustainability professional.”

Transition to generative AI on AWS

More recently in 2023, Climate Pledge Arena transitioned their sustainability data management to FlexZero, a holistic sustainability-as-a-service provider offering both sustainability consulting and a highly customizable sustainability SaaS platform built on AWS. Leveraging AWS serverless architecture and Amazon Bedrock, FlexZero enhanced CPA’s sustainability efforts through advanced automation, streamlined data management, and the integration of generative AI (gen AI).

Using gen AI and a new solution built by FlexZero helps convert all the arena’s utility bills—whether paper or PDF—into actionable data. In the future, Sareen points out, predictive AI will power a chatbot that helps Treat’s team understand the ramifications of new sustainability initiatives at Climate Pledge Arena.

“We pride ourselves on being a comprehensive sustainability-as-a-service provider,” says David Johnsen, Chief Product Officer of FlexZero. “Climate Pledge Arena is an ideal partner because they are deeply committed to accurately representing their results. AWS’s serverless solutions have enabled us to rapidly and cost-effectively deliver to help to refine their methodology, automate data sharing with third parties, and integrate generative AI using Amazon Bedrock to optimize data input and summarize outcomes.” The use of AWS solutions and tools to aggregate and analyze large amounts of data directly contributed to CPA becoming the world’s first net-zero arena. For example, because CPA was able to access and analyze comprehensive data regarding transportation impacts, they were able to successfully work with the city to promote the use of public transportation to arena events to help lower the overall carbon footprint of attendees.

AWS will showcase many of these developer tools at its re:Invent conference December 2–6 in Las Vegas. At re:Invent, developers learn about new releases and tools available from AWS, including how the company is creating the next wave of applications powered by predictive and generative artificial intelligence. It’s innovation like this that has AWS customers such as Treat excited about the future. “My hope is that generative AI helps practitioners like myself make decisions quicker, spending less time on compiling large sets of data,” Treat says. “It gives people like me more time to devise strategies to reduce carbon emissions or waste. The more time I have to implement projects on-site, the less time I’m bogged down by collecting data—that’s where I see AI benefiting a role like mine.”