Fighting Climate Change with the Cloud

Climate change threatens natural resources such as water, forests, and wildlife that sustain our way of life. The degradation and loss of these resources affects all of us – which means that every community should have access to the climate data it needs to be part of the solution.

AWS Cloud democratizes data and analytics, making it possible for all sorts of organizations to access and process high-quality open data sets so they can forecast harmful events (such as forest fires), assess land degradation, and find the most effective ways to restore ecosystems with an eye toward achieving environmental justice.

The cloud also provides a platform for modelers to run analyses and evaluate risks as climate change amps up the frequency and severity of natural disasters. For instance, modelers can use AWS to see how coastlines will change and plan how to protect lives and property as storm surges, floods and wildfires become more frequent.

In order to better manage climate challenges, organizations need to tackle skill shortages when it comes to gathering, cleaning, and analyzing climate data. AWS is committed to closing this skills gap through high-quality education and training programs, as well as data modeling platforms that enable analysts to build machine learning (ML) models using point-and-click interfaces without having to write code.

In 2020, the United Nations Development Program estimated that cities account for 70% of global GHG emissions. With urban populations expected to increase over the next few decades, cities will need smart buildings and public infrastructure to become more efficient and resilient.

Smart city initiatives typically depend on large amounts of data collected through mobile networks and analyzed automatically. AWS offers cities powerful tools so they can monitor, manage, and model smart infrastructure solutions using digital twin technology, hyper-localized 5G capabilities, and IoT integrations.

Climate change often has the greatest impact on those communities with the fewest resources. That’s why AWS Innovation Studio has partnered with organizations like the Resilient Cities Network and the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown University to show how cloud-based data analytics can lead to climate solutions that produce fairer and more equitable outcomes for all communities.

On a more granular level, AWS can help building managers improve efficiency and sustainability by collecting data from IoT sensors, analyzing that information using AI/ML services, and tracking KPIs on easy-to-read dashboards. Indeed, Amazon itself uses AWS in this way to improve sustainability at over 350 fulfillment centers and get closer to The Climate Pledge commitment of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

Energy use is a huge contributor to total GHG, which has driven governments around the world from Australia to Europe and the UK to invest heavily in deriving power from clean energy sources. With its new clean energy directives, the US federal government aims seeks to leverage its scale and procurement power in order to eliminate carbon pollution from the nation’s energy sector by 2035. ²

As energy grids become more complex with the integration of significant generating capacity from renewable sources, AWS can help increase grid resiliency, simplify management, and improve availability of essential systems.

The cloud integrates data analytics, high performance computing, graph networks, and AI/ML models to enable faster and less expensive grid simulations, as well as more accurate predictions of energy use and demand.

For example, GE Renewable Energy has used AWS to manage IoT data from over 40,000 assets spread across more than 35 countries. This partnership helped GE improve its system availability from 89-92% to 99.9%.³ 

Governments are developing new regulations to direct capital toward building more sustainable economies. At the same time, public and private sectors face serious challenges in calculating the financial impact of climate risks and integrating ESG metrics into their investment, lending, and underwriting decisions.

Cloud computing can help stakeholders surmount these challenges. Modelers can use petabyte-scale open-source climate data hosted by AWS to manage climate finance risks and investment strategies. Organizations can then clean, process, and integrate this data into custom ESG scoring models. The scores emerging from these models can be tested and validated using ML techniques.

Supply chain disruptions and inefficiencies can also cause major financial problems for public and private sector enterprises. Consider, for instance, how an estimated one-third of total global food production is lost or wasted, in part due to inefficient distribution systems. ⁴

AWS underpins cloud-based supply chain solutions that improve visibility and real-time monitoring. In the agricultural sector, this sort of transparency can help both with measuring Scope 3 emissions and also with reducing waste by ensuring that perishable goods are properly kept safe in cold chains from producer to consumer.

Climate change is a global challenge. Meeting this challenge requires creativity and innovation of people around the world. The cloud facilitates this real-time sharing of knowledge and insights across borders, domains, industries, cultures, and languages.

Organizations in both the public and private sectors can implement best practices powered by AWS to make real progress on key climate goals, such as advancing low-emission ways of living and working, protecting human health, preserving natural resources, and improving access to high-quality climate data, models. In these ways, AWS cloud can help people around the world meet the challenges of climate change by accelerating the development of real-world solutions to aid those populations with the greatest needs.