Carbon Elimination

Signatories will implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris Agreement through real business change and innovations, including efficiency improvements, renewable energy, materials reductions, and other carbon emission elimination strategies.

The time to act is now

According to NOAA, the amount of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere is at its highest level in 3 million years, mainly as a consequence of burning fossil fuels.

According to the IPCC, which sets out the scientific consensus on climate change, CO2 emissions must be halved between now and 2030 to have a strong chance of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5ºC eventually reaching net zero carbon by mid-century or earlier. Every year of delay reduces the likelihood we can stave off the worst effects of climate change on humankind and our planet. The Climate Pledge is tackling this challenge head-on. By uniting on a journey to transform the operations of companies, signatories to The Climate Pledge can have a cumulatively outsized impact.

“It’s an all-hands-on-deck problem. Everyone needs to do it together, otherwise we’re not going to make a dent globally”.

Amy Ridener Director Global Sustainability, Verizon.

The Climate Pledge asks signatories consider their emissions in a different way: To see them as an opportunity to reach net zero carbon with era-defining modernization, innovation, and investment in cross-sector change. To move from seeing decarbonization as a ball-and-chain burden, to seeing it as our time to shape a completely new way of thinking, being, and working. Because it’s more than decarbonizing our world. It’s decarbonizing the components of the economies on which it lives, thrives, and survives.

Catalysts of change

The Climate Pledge signatories aim to work together to build new marketplaces for greener, lower emissions products and services, attract and scale the innovations that can cut operational emissions through energy use, transportation, packaging, and all aspects of operations, including the use of our products and services.

We see our role as changing our own businesses and in the process, catalysing economy-wide solutions that can impact many other business sectors. And beyond that, the knock-on economic signals embolden policymakers and governments to double down on their climate change strategies and implement more ambitious policies.

The road to 2040

“The truth is, with a complex and global business like Amazon; We don’t know all of the ways that we will get there by 2040.

We’re leading with science and will rely on technologies that we are only beginning to invent and invest in—and some of which don’t yet exist—to drive many of our business changes to decarbonize. But one thing is for certain: we will get there and we’ll do this through great partnerships like the community we’re building with the Pledge”.

Kara Hurst Head of Sustainability, Amazon.

Sure, our 2040 goal is ambitious. We know getting there will present huge, unique challenges, some of which we don’t yet know are coming. To hit these decarbonization challenges head-on and open a world of opportunity, The Climate Pledge Fund is a $2 billion commitment to accelerating the development of the tech we need. The focus is on unprecedented innovation across transportation and logistics, buildings and construction, materials and manufacturing, energy generation, storage, and utilization, right through to food and agriculture. All helping our signatories’ interwoven businesses.

The fund welcomes signatories as co-investors, to maximize potential both for them, and also across the wider business community. Looking at the tech advancements in the last 20 years that initially seemed daunting—and prohibitively expensive (solar energy and cloud computing are cases in point)—what can the next 20 years look like? Let’s find out. It’s this strength-in-numbers approach that will get us there.

Coming together

Signatories to The Climate Pledge benefit from sharing access to best practices, innovations in supply chain enhancements, co-investing in new technologies, and scaling up emerging solutions to tackle carbon reductions as quickly as possible.

Take this example: Mercedes-Benz signed The Climate Pledge, and as part of the company’s own target of CO2-neutral mobility with its Ambition2039 roadmap, committed 1,800 electric delivery vehicles to Amazon’s European fleet. Here, we see the symbiosis that’s central to our community hitting net zero carbon, and the mutual benefits of The Climate Pledge writ large.

We may not have all the answers yet. But together, we do have the influence, reach, and ability to decarbonize our business—and the world—at the scale and speed decarbonization science tells us is absolutely essential.

The Three Pledge Commitments