Amazon adds Microsoft, Unilever to its climate group that critics say lacks transparency

When Amazon announced the Climate Pledge a little more than a year ago, critics questioned the need, given that carbon-reporting standards already exist. Amazon hadn’t participated in leading initiative CDP (formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project), a framework for corporate reporting on environmental issues. The Climate Pledge initiative, which Amazon developed with former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres, doesn’t include standardized rules for what signatories must disclose or metrics for what they must measure.

Amazon announced the pledge last year just a day before more than 1,800 Amazon employees walked off the job to protest the company’s track record on environmental responsibility. Those workers questioned Amazon’s commitment to addressing climate change as it pushes to deliver packages to customer within a day or two, and pursues cloud-computing contracts that help energy companies accelerate oil and gas extraction.

At the pledge’s launch, Amazon was the first and only signatory of the newly formed group, whose members it said would pledge to implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris agreement with the aim to be at net zero carbon across their businesses by 2040.

The newest signatories of the pledge join a handful of other companies that signed onto the initiative in past months, including Best Buy, Mercedes-Benz, Uber and Siemens. In addition to Microsoft, the new signatories include the British bottler Coca-Cola European Partners, the Seattle running-shoe maker Brooks, and Canadian seaplane airline Harbour Air.

“There are now 31 companies from around the world that have signed The Climate Pledge, and collectively we are sending an important signal to the market that there is significant and rapidly growing demand for technologies that can help us build a zero-carbon economy,” Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, said in a statement.

CDP is a nonprofit that works with companies to measure their environmental impact as well as the internal strategies to combat climate change. This year, more than 8,000 companies around the world submitted reports to the organization.

Amazon joined a separate effort, the Science Based Target Initiative, in June, vice president of worldwide sustainability Kara Hurst said in an emailed statement. Members of that group, which is led by CDP and other environmental organizations, set carbon-emission goals to limit global warming.

In response to employees pressing Amazon to end cloud-computing contracts that help energy companies accelerate oil and gas extraction, Hurst pointed to a policy manifesto it posted a little more than a year ago, committing to work with the industry “to make their legacy businesses less carbon intensive and help them accelerate development of renewable energy businesses.”

The Climate Pledge is “a bold and ambitious commitment to fight climate change,” Hurst said.

To build support for the Climate Pledge, Amazon has advertised its commitment to the initiative’s goals. And it bought the naming rights to the arena for a new National Hockey League team in Seattle, calling it Climate Pledge Arena.

The Climate Pledge is “a branding exercise,” said Aseem Prakash, a University of Washington professor and the director of the school’s Center for Environmental Politics. He’s not entirely dismissive of that, since it can motivate others to address the challenges of climate change. But Prakash also believes Amazon needs to do more, such as participate in CDP so its progress can be compared to other companies, and by providing more meaningful metrics in its own sustainability reporting.

“They’ve wrapped themselves in the cloak of environmental respectability,” Prakash said.

That lack of disclosure to CDP has consistently earned Amazon an F grade from the group. By comparison, Microsoft earned an A from CDP this year, in part for being transparent in disclosing data about its environmental impact.

Microsoft signed Amazon’s Climate Pledge to “amplify the message” of addressing climate change, said Lucas Joppa, the company’s chief environmental officer. The company intends to continue to report to CDP, as well as pursue other efforts to address climate change such as its announcement in January to remove more carbon than it emits by the end of the decade.

“Showing solidarity here is a really important message to share with the world,” Joppa said of Microsoft’s decision to sign the pledge.

Unilever, too, will continue to participate in CDP. The company, like Microsoft, also received an A grade for its climate-change efforts from CDP for disclosing information about its environmental impact. It signed the Climate Pledge, in part, because its goal of accelerating the Paris agreement targets “offered something new given the urgency of the challenge,” Thomas Lingard, Unilever’s global climate and environment director, said in an emailed statement.

Amazon’s environmental footprint is massive and growing as its e-commerce and cloud-computing business surges during the coronavirus pandemic, as more people shop online and work from home. The company now leases more than 80 cargo jets. Its contractors employ more than 400,000 drivers to deliver packages. And its cloud-computing division operates 24 massive data centers that guzzle energy around the globe.

Amazon has taken some steps, such as investing in electric vehicles and renewable energy for its cloud business, to reduce its carbon footprint.

It’s also faced harsh criticism from its own employees. The company fired two tech workers who challenged the company’s climate policies and who subsequently denounced the conditions at its warehouses as unsafe during the coronavirus pandemic. Amazon has said it fired the workers for violating company policies.