Amazon’s Customer Carbon Footprint Tool (CCFT), which aims to help AWS customers track and measure carbon emissions has added Scope 3 to its tracking data. The CCFT update also includes expanded Scope 1 emissions categories.
Per The Carbon Trust, Scope 1 emissions are those direct emissions from owned or controlled sources. Scope 2 are indirect emissions from the purchase and use of electricity, steam, heating and cooling. Scope 3 includes all other indirect emissions that occur in the upstream and downstream activities of an organisation.
Amazon’s Scope 3 emissions would include things like embodied carbon from facilities, hardware, upstream and downstream transport (of data and of physical items), and even investments.
To decide what Scope 3 categories to include in their model Amazon evaluated how material each was to overall carbon impact. The resulting methodology now includes Fuel- and energy-related activities (“FERA” under the GHG Protocol), IT hardware, and buildings and equipment.
The Scope 3 emissions are amortized over each assets’ service life (6 years for IT hardware, 50 years for buildings) to calculate monthly emissions.
Cause for optimism? Or lip service to sustainability?
The updated Amazon Scope 1 tracking data also now adds refrigerants and natural gas, to the existing Scope 1 categories of fuel combustion in emergency backup (diesel) generators.
“Although Scope 1 emissions represent a small share of overall emissions, we provide our customers with a complete image of their carbon emissions,” Amazon explained in a post.
Cloud sustainability expert Mark Butcher, director of Posetiv Cloud, was cautiously optimistic in a LinkedIn post:
“Technically it stacks up, there’s what appears to be decent lifecycle modelling, proper amortisation of embodied carbon, and alignment with ISO 14064, GHG Protocol etc. It’s a huge upgrade from the vague guesstimates we’ve had until now that mostly seemed 99% too low.
“But… (bet you saw this coming), it’s remains quite a long way from giving customers what they actually need.”
There’s no doubt the upgrade is a welcome improvement. The initial 2022 release of the Amazon CCFT offered only a general report on energy use and left users underwhelmed. Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) data was subsequently added, and in May of this year, an update allowed customers to see their carbon footprint by AWS service region, rather than just global geographt. The update also exported reports at a higher date resolution – down to the gram, rather 100 of grams, of CO2e.
Getting clarity on cloud is hard
Acquiring reliable information on data center emissions accurately has been notoriously difficult, with most cloud providers ducking real transparency into their environmental impact. Of these providers, AWS has been one of the slowest to provide satisfying sustainability data. In a 2023 presentation, Amazon VP and CTO Werner Vogels infamously declared that “cost is a pretty good approximation of sustainability,” an assertion widely mocked by cloud sustainability experts.
In 2023, Amazon was dropped by the SBTi (Science Based Targets Initiative) an organization that helps businesses set and validate emissions reduction goals after Amazon had missed a deadline to submit its emissions reduction targets. At the time Amazon said it valued SBTi’s work and would continue to cooperate with the organization.
At the beginning of this year, days after Jeff Bezos appeared on the dias at the US presidential inauguration, the Bezos Earth Fund announced its withdrawal of funding for the SBTi. The Bezos Earth Fund had been one of the organization’s principle funders, along with the Ikea Foundation.
In addition to emissions, water usage by data centers is a ballooning problem, especially in a world running out of fresh water. Amazon has recently come under scrutiny for its reluctance to share water data. Last month, The Guardian reported that Amazon staff chose to obscure the company’s real water usage numbers in a public-facing “Water Positive” sustainability campaign by revealing only primary use.