Accelerating sustainable outcomes for Europe’s future with cloud and machine learning

 Hard-wiring sustainability into digital transformation and innovation is crucial as the European Union strives to achieve its twin climate and digital transitions. As David Jensen, coordinator of the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Digital Transformation Task Force, said at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in Brussels, “Technologies play an accelerating role; we must ensure they are accelerating solutions that tackle climate goals, and not inadvertently accelerating past or existing initiatives that hinder our progress in sustainability and make it harder to wean ourselves off entrenched approaches.”

Christopher Wellise is the Director of Sustainability and Carbon of Amazon Web Services.

Data is at the centre of this challenge and opportunity

Like many business challenges, data is often important to understanding environmental problems. As a global community, we must use data in ways that benefit society. One great example is how artificial intelligence (AI) has been used to tackle deforestation. The Forest Foresight project was developed by WWF using AWS technology to predict potential areas of illegal deforestation. (...)