Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon, talks to McKinsey about scaling Amazon’s sustainability initiatives, including increasing its focus on nature-based solutions to benefit communities. How is Amazon working on reaching its Climate Pledge goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2040?
While the scope of this challenge is large, Amazon has been taking bold steps to reimagine its operations, including building 479 solar and wind projects around the world, inventing a recyclable packaging material and limiting plastic packaging waste, deploying thousands of electric delivery vehicles globally, and putting Climate Pledge Friendly badges on products that qualify for the program. In addition, numerous nature-based solution projects are underway to enhance climate resilience and improve outcomes for local communities.
Kara Hurst: “We’re now at the point where we’re beginning to recognize the fruits of the investment, and soon we’ll reach our goal of making electric vehicle delivery not just the norm, but the expectation. We recently crossed the 10,000-vehicle milestone in the United States and have begun rolling out the first vans from Rivian in the European Union. We intend to have 100,000 in our global fleet by 2030, which will complement our multifaceted electrification strategy around the world. In India, for example, we’ve partnered with manufacturers such as Mahindra Electric to provide more than 6,000 electric vehicles currently and plan to have 10,000 there by 2025. In many regions, we’re also investing in electrified micromobility solutions”.
And, Karta Hurst continues: “By fielding this many electric vehicles, we’re seeing second and third order effects that are informing our sustainability strategy beyond the vehicles themselves. For example, chargers are needed to power an electric fleet, so we now have more than 12,000 chargers installed at over 100 delivery stations in the United States. And these chargers are tapping into our renewable energy strategy, where we are on track to have all of the electricity powering our operations be attributable to renewable energy sources by 2025”.
Source: McKinsey