Category: Sustainability

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.

The Busan Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) teamed up with the World Food Programme (WFP), the Busan IT Promotion Agency, and technology startup Nuvilab to use cloud technology to address food waste in South Korea. Using Amazon’s “Working Backwards” approach with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data lake solutions on AWS, the team developed Zero Waste Zero Hunger (ZWZH), a program that uses artificial intelligence AI to provide data about food consumption.

Earlier this year, AWS launched the 2022 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 Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab, or any AWS Cloud services, to build solutions that support one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the United Nations (UN). Learn more about the winning projects.

With the launch of the new AWS Middle East (UAE) Region, AWS is releasing an Economic Impact Study that estimates that the new infrastructure region will support an average of 5,984 full-time jobs annually in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over the next 15 years through investments of AED 20.1 billion (US $5 billion). The study provides an overview of existing and planned AWS infrastructure investments in UAE, and the economic benefits AWS investments create for the UAE economy. Read on for key insights from the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region Economic Impact Study.

As consumption of materials continues to increase and competition for natural resources grows, building sustainable and resilient infrastructure is crucial in the fight against climate change. This is why AWS is launching the next AWS Sustainable Cities Accelerator cohort with a focus on infrastructure. The program empowers startups and leadership in the space to define, grow, and scale the cutting-edge solutions needed to solve today’s biggest infrastructure challenges. 

On Wednesday, August 31, Max Peterson, vice president of worldwide public sector at AWS, delivered the keynote address at the AWS Summit Canberra. Max shared regional announcements and local stories of how public sector customers are using the cloud to transform citizen services, innovate in healthcare, improve sustainability, and more. Two customer speakers joined the stage to share how AWS helps their organizations support their mission success and reimagine what’s possible. What’d you miss at the AWS Summit Canberra keynote?

The cloud offers transformative solutions to address sustainability challenges, enabling organizations to increase productivity, efficiency, and cost savings, as well as reduce emissions and waste. The cloud also enables data analytics and research at scale, allowing us to better understand and track key climate metrics required for fighting climate change. From smart devices that track water and energy consumption, to machine learning and artificial intelligence to support sustainable farming, organizations across the globe are using AWS to meet their sustainability goals.