Five years on, Amazon’s Climate Pledge leaves a legacy of weak and broken promises in U.S. shipping and deliveries
In September 2019, Amazon announced a bold commitment to climate progress, aiming to meet the Paris Agreement targets by 2040. Since then, the company has used the Climate Pledge to both distract from the growing dock-to-door emissions from its U.S. imports and deliveries, and to cheat its way to climate progress. A joint investigation by Stand.earth Research Group (SRG), the Clean Mobility Collective (CMC), and the Ship it Zero (SiZ) campaign reveals Amazon’s greenhouse gas emissions increased approximately 25% since that announcement.
Transportation is the world’s largest source of new greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change. The explosion of the e-commerce sector in recent years, driven by Amazon’s ever-faster delivery, has made it much harder to align transportation emissions with critical near-term targets.
Amazon logistics delivered 5.9 billion parcels in the U.S., and an estimated 8.9 billion parcels globally in 2023.
Amazon has been and continues to be a prime polluter in the transportation sector. It has a responsibility to be a part of the solution — for our planet and the lives and livelihoods of its customers, of course, but also to preserve the long-term operations of its business.
Every package’s journey from dock to door accumulates emissions from the different modes of transportation used by Amazon. For instance, last-mile delivery trucks comprised 20.6% of emissions for parcels delivered in 2023.
Sadly, five years since announcing the Climate Pledge, an assessment of Amazon’s efforts to reduce emissions shows the company to be woefully failing this commitment. During this time, Amazon backtracked on existing promises and started moving in the wrong direction.
In 2023, Amazon Logistics U.S. dock-to-door delivery pollution generated 5.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, which represents an 18% average year-over-year growth since 2019.