In September 2019, Amazon announced—and was the first signatory of—the Climate Pledge, which has the objective of meeting the goals of the Paris agreement ten years early. The remarks below were taken from the Climate Pledge’s launch press conference. They include comments from Dara O’Rourke, who leads the sustainability science team at Amazon.

THOSE WHO SIGN the Climate Pledge agree to, number one, measure and report their emissions on a regular basis and, number two, to implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris agreement, which basically means that these are real things they are doing in their business, things they’re changing in their actual business activities to eliminate carbon.

And then, third, with any remaining emissions they cannot eliminate with real change, they agree to do offsets that are credible. And what do we mean by credible offsets? We mean nature-based solutions.

The Climate Pledge really can only be done in collaboration with other large companies, because we’re all part of each other’s supply chains. So we need to work together to meet these goals. It has to be done that way. Amazon signed up to use our scale and our scope to lead the way and become a role model. It is, however, a difficult challenge for us because of our deep, large physical infrastructure. We’re not only moving information around. We’re also moving packages around. We deliver more than ten billion items a year, and that is physical infrastructure at real scale. So we can make the argument—and we plan to do so passionately—that if we can do this, anyone can. It’s going to be challenging, but we know we can do it, and we know we have to do it.

It can only be done if there is real scientific integrity behind Amazon’s every action. Dara O’Rourke explained Amazon’s approach:

Teams across all of Amazon have been working since 2016 to map and measure the company’s overall environmental impacts. They have been laying the foundational layer of scientific models and data systems to build sustainability in a very Amazonian way. That is, science connected to technology connected to customer obsession to approach the scale of the sustainability challenges we all face.

Over the last few years, the core of that work has been collecting data, building models, and building tools. Not just for teams to track their environmental emissions—their carbon—but to enable them to radically reduce carbon across the company and down supply chains.

Amazon is a very large and complex company, and that forced us to build one of the most sophisticated carbon-accounting systems in the world. We had to build a system that could get to granular data, but at Amazon scale to give teams innovation optionality and to see the overall company view. Actionability requires this finer level of resolution of data. Our system is both comprehensive in covering the entire company and precise enough to get down to system-level optimizations.

We can go all the way down to individual products, processes, and services. With Echo, for example, we need to understand the impact of the manufacturing step back up to the data centers powering Alexa and then across to the planes, the trucks, and the packages that deliver that Echo to a customer’s house.

So far, we’ve built five models based on an academic technique called environmental life-cycle assessment. Four are process models in transportation, in packaging, in electricity for both our fulfillment centers and data centers, and in devices. We combined internal operational data—physical data processed with financial data—with external scientific data to stitch it all together into our carbon footprint.

We’re also using this data in our climate risk analysis. We have partnered with Amazon Web Services to host over 55 foundational weather, climate and sustainability datasets, leveraging the infrastructure of AWS, with cutting-edge machine-learning tools that are already being used by NGOs, academics, and governments around the world to actually solve climate problems.

We take business-specific activity data. We connect it to emissions models. We run it through an orchestration layer that stitches it all together into decision-support tools—dashboards, metrics, mechanisms that teams can use across the company to drive carbon out. Each of these models has a detailed logic and fine-grained data underneath it.

The transportation model is focused on the critical drivers of carbon, in this case vehicle types, fuel types, and routes. This allows us to analyze our existing networks and logistics and also to understand emerging technologies, emerging vehicles, alternative fuels. We’re now able to model the electronic vehicles (EVs) that are coming, the drones that are coming, the next transportation innovation that will come. Ultimately this allows us to design sustainability into our future typologies, technologies, and customer innovations.

These metrics, this data, provides insights for teams across Amazon that we otherwise wouldn’t have, including things that may be counterintuitive. Same-day shipping is actually our lowest carbon ship option. This is because getting inventory local to customers is almost always a sustainability win.

These systems we built—the models, the metrics—are now giving detailed views for teams across Amazon to help them reduce carbon. We are moving from totals to targeted emissions and innovations for Amazon’s customers and the planet.

We want to be leaders and role models. You know, we’ve been in the middle of the herd on this issue, and we want to move to the forefront. We want to be leaders. We want to say to other companies that if a company of Amazon’s complexity, scale, scope, and physical infrastructure can do this, so can you.

Today Amazon is at 40 percent renewable energy. We’ve done that by building fifteen utility-scale solar and wind farms. We’ve put rooftop installations on fulfillment centers and sortation centers around the world.

Where are we going? Well, on renewable energy we have committed to reaching 80 percent renewable energy by 2040. And by 2030 we’re committing to being at 100 percent renewable. The team is pushing to get to 100 percent by 2025 and has a credible plan to pull that off.

We also have a lot of delivery vans, and they all burn fossil fuels today. In September 2019 we placed an order for one hundred thousand electric delivery vans to be built by a company called Rivian. A pledge like the Climate Pledge will drive the economy to start to build products and services that these large companies need to meet those commitments. This is why we invested $440 million in Rivian.

We are in partnership with the Nature Conservancy, funding something called the Right Now Climate Fund. We’re contributing $100 million to reforestation. Reforestation is a great example of a nature-based solution for removing carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere.

As this economy develops and people get serious about being carbon-zero through real changes to their real business activities, that is going to be a gigantic signal to the marketplace to start inventing and developing the new technologies these global companies will need to be able to meet this commitment. And so that’s another reason we have to work together. We need to get a number of companies to sign up for this to really drive that market signal in a strong way. Amazon is large, but if we get lots of large companies to agree to the same thing, that will send an even stronger signal to the market—especially as the supply chains are so interconnected. Collaboration becomes the only way to do it.