Digital sustainability: The 2040 corporate commitment

Every company in the world is going to face pressures to understand their carbon footprint and decarbonize what they do. Adrian Cockroft, VP of Sustainability Architecture at Amazon joined us live from AWS’ re:Invent 2021 to discuss more on their sustainability journey to the 2040 Climate Pledge. Listen to this fireside chat to hear the challenges, the benefits and the opportunities for companies that embrace the commitment to sustainability. Episode highlights: 1. AWS is looking at the spectrum of sustainability: carbon, decarbonizing, circular economy, recycling, limiting single use materials, social responsibility – to understand how to get Amazon to act more sustainability that’s specific to their departments 2. There is no off-the-shelf solution for sustainable plans. Every market and industry is different and sustainability needs for partners and any company must be customized 3. Sustainability is a broad and confusing space. There are challenges in understanding how to measure carbon footprint and understanding Scope 3 carbon emissions in order to manage it down to reduce emissions 4. Supply chain and impact areas. Companies will need to look at their raw materials and do the math to understand where most of the carbon is going, being consumed – where is the money being spent and where is the bigger carbon footprint? Things like data centers, buildings– sometimes making a small imprint to the bigger footprint makes better progress. When we get companies to lean into the commitment to make it sustainable by 2040, then suppliers will figure out how to make it sustainable. 5. Similar to digital transformation, sustainability transformation requires agility. It requires a new mental mindset and culture for sustainability.