Tag: environment

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) focusing on sustainability are dedicated to fostering a healthy environment, preserving our planet, and providing a livable future for upcoming generations. This post highlights how NPOs and NGOs across the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to drive their missions. It also addresses the challenges they face in digital transformation and offers resources to navigate those challenges.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is supporting AirGradient, a manufacturer of affordable and accurate air quality monitors, to launch an air quality tracking program with Mechai Bamboo School in Thailand. The program—which will see 100 monitors donated to the school and its partners, part of a wider donation of 200 monitors from AWS to non-government organisations across Asia via AirGradient—will teach students about the science of air quality, the consequences of air pollution, and how to use the monitors.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted the AWS Sustainability Breakfast Briefing on February 20, 2024, in Dublin, Ireland, featuring a panel of sustainability experts from AWS customers and partners, as well as educational talks on important sustainability themes. The main takeaway is that sustainability transformation takes time – but every step along the journey can be meaningful. Read this blog post for a recap of key highlights from the briefing.

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.

As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), AWS invited Rafael Monge Vargas, director of the National Center of GeoEnvironmental Information (CENIGA) at the Costa Rica’s Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE), to share how his team is helping advance conservation and economic development in Costa Rica and how they utilize ASDI and AWS to support these efforts.

The nonprofit American Forests is focused on advancing social equity with a national reforestation movement. Trees provide significant benefits against heat related illnesses and climate change, and trees can help advance social equity when they are planted in the neighborhoods that need them the most. But the challenge of achieving Tree Equity across the country is immense. To address this, American Forests is leading a new national campaign through the Tree Equity Score, powered by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

Azavea believes in the power of geospatial technology to improve communities and the planet. Azavea has been exploring the power of this technology to help their clients to answer complex questions in a wide range of domains from urban ecosystems, infrastructure planning, and economic development to water, energy, and climate change. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), we invited Jessica Cahail, product manager at Azavea, to share how her organization is using AWS and open data to develop tools that help users address environmental challenges and deliver knowledge to support decision making.

As a physical oceanographer focused on remote sensing, Dr. Chelle Gentemann, senior scientist at Farallon Institute, has worked for over 20 years on retrievals of ocean temperature from space. She uses measurements of sea surface temperature from satellites to understand how the ocean impacts our lives. Chelle’s work requires analysis of large volumes of data, which requires access to large data storage and computational resources. Although most large research institutions can secure those IT resources, that is not the case for smaller organizations or underserved communities around the world. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, we invited Dr. Gentemann to share her perspective on the value of hosting high-resolution climate data on AWS.

Despite its abundance of natural resources, Colombia has the fourth highest rate of deforestation worldwide. To help battle deforestation and illegal logging, Amazon Web Services (AWS), in collaboration with the United States Embassy in Colombia and Jorge Tadeo University (UTadeo), sponsored the Zoo Hackathon event in Bogota in November 2019.

At the AWS Public Sector Summit in Canberra, Australia, more than 1,300 technologists convened to learn about digital transformation through cloud technologies, and were able to get inspired, dive deep, and begin to build. Keynote speakers highlighted the impact AWS can have on the individual, society, security, government, and the economy in the Australia and New Zealand region.