Goals and Progress

Like many companies and countries that invest in long-range goals, we know that the path to achieving net-zero carbon will be challenging, perhaps not following a linear progression from year to year. A goal of this scale requires bold commitments and innovation to transform our entire business over a prolonged period of time, along with perseverance and daily actions by business leaders. Across our company, we are laying the groundwork for the next 20 years of accelerated progress, starting with real-time carbon reporting structures to equip teams with actionable data and help them reduce carbon emissions in every part of our business.

At the same time, we are making significant investments in both proven and emerging technologies to address the largest contributors to our carbon footprint – deploying new renewable energy projects, electrifying our fleet of delivery vehicles, retrofitting buildings and more. We are also helping to build a cross-sector community of companies, organisations and partners through The Climate Pledge to collectively solve the challenges of decarbonising our economy.

Our commitment to a sustainable future depends upon the people who support our value chain each and every day – from the factory workers who make the products we sell, to the associates in our fulfilment centres, to the drivers who deliver packages to our customers. We are committed to ensuring that our employees, workers and communities are treated with dignity and respect. While these fundamental values have been long-held at Amazon, in 2019, we codified them into a set of Human Rights Principles, reaffirming our commitment to human rights and outlining our approach across all aspects of our business.

In 2020, we built upon this commitment initiating a human rights saliency assessment in accordance with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The results of this assessment help us prioritise key areas where we have the greatest opportunity to have a positive impact on workers and communities. We know we have more to do, and we are committed to continuously widening our lens to better understand the potential human rights impacts of our business.

We are proud of the progress we made towards our sustainability goals and commitments in 2020, a year of unprecedented challenges for our world. Since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we worked non-stop to make hundreds of changes to our operational processes to protect the health of our employees and communities. We invested more than 11.5 billion USD in COVID-related initiatives, with safety measures, supplies and special benefits for our front-line employees.

When jobs were lost during the pandemic, Amazon helped get people back to work: we recruited 500,000 new employees, whose jobs in hospitality, restaurants, travel and other industries had been lost or furloughed. To support the communities that we are proud to call home, we donated millions of dollars in cash grants and in-kind contributions to local businesses and organisations fighting the COVID-19 outbreak across the globe.