Tag: sustainability

Managing water crises is one of the Sustainable Development Goals and the decline in the available quality and quantity of fresh water is ranked as one of the top ten most serious societal risks by the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Global Risks report. Using satellite imagery available through the AWS Open Data Program and the AWS Cloud, BlueDot Observatory is establishing a global monitoring system for all at-risk water bodies. This monitoring reveals a sad truth – the total loss of water bodies is in the not too distant future.

We invited Anze Zupanc, a data scientist who manages the BlueDot Observatory at Sinergise, to share how the AWS Open Data Program and the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative support this work.

Amazon today announced the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative to promote sustainability research, innovation, and problem solving by making key data easily accessible and even more widely available. The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative leverages Amazon Web Services’ technology and scalable infrastructure to stage, analyze, and distribute data, and is a joint effort between the AWS Open Data and Amazon Sustainability teams.

Achieving sustainable development and addressing local and national needs requires access and analysis of large datasets and the use of complex tools and algorithms. This creates barriers for many users, particularly for communities in developing countries where resources for data storage and data analysis are limited. The African Regional Data Cube (ARDC), a new data management technology developed on AWS, hopes to address this challenge by building capacity in those communities to access large datasets in support of their local and national needs framed around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the broader development priorities.

The United Nations has named 17 goals that will help boost sustainable development worldwide. DigitalGlobe worked to find passionate participants who can leverage DigitalGlobe’s GBDX platform and imagery for geospatial projects supporting work in areas such as disaster response, food security, poverty elimination, and ending malaria. DigitalGlobe’s GBDX uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud-based access to its entire 100-petabyte imagery library. With the support of AWS, the GBDX for Sustainability Challenge taps into the potential of that vast digital library to support the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Extracting meaningful information from satellite imagery at scale is only possible because of the AWS Cloud.

World leaders at the United Nations agreed on a universal set of goals and indicators that would bring government, civil society, and the private sector together to end extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change by 2030. Technology and cloud-based solutions will be a critical part of achieving the Global Goals for Sustainable Development (SDGs). AWS has teamed […]

Happy Earth Day! In addition to the environmental benefits associated with running applications in the cloud, AWS has a long-term commitment to achieve 100% renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure footprint. As of the end of 2016, we had achieved our goal of 40% renewable energy, and recently awarded ACORE’s Corporate Innovation and Industry […]

At last night’s American Council on Renewable Energy’s (ACORE) 15th Anniversary Gala in Washington D.C, Amazon received the Corporate Innovation and Industry Leadership Award in recognition of Amazon’s commitment to renewable energy. Spanning retail, devices, media, cloud computing and more, Amazon is pioneering new products and services on behalf of customers to build a more […]