---
title: "How Amazon tracks carbon intensity across its operations"
description: "Amazon measures carbon intensity across its diverse business operations to track progress toward its goal of reaching net-zero carbon by 2040. For retail operations, the company monitors carbon emissions per unit shipped, achieving a 39 percent reduction by the end of 2025 compared to 2019 baselines. This per-unit decrease stems from targeted investments in electric delivery vehicles, carbon-free energy, smarter package routing, lightweight packaging, low-carbon fuels, and alternative transport modes like rail. To improve industry comparability and transparency, the company updated its economic carbon intensity indicator in 2025 from emissions per dollar of gross merchandise sales to emissions per dollar of revenue. Carbon intensity is also evaluated regionally and nationally to isolate geographic variations and implement localized decarbonization interventions across supply chain networks."
---

# How Amazon tracks carbon intensity across its operations

amazon.science · Kerry Constabile · Jul 1, 2026

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

Amazon measures carbon intensity across its diverse business operations to track progress toward its goal of reaching net-zero carbon by 2040. For retail operations, the company monitors carbon emissions per unit shipped, achieving a 39 percent reduction by the end of 2025 compared to 2019 baselines. This per-unit decrease stems from targeted investments in electric delivery vehicles, carbon-free energy, smarter package routing, lightweight packaging, low-carbon fuels, and alternative transport modes like rail. To improve industry comparability and transparency, the company updated its economic carbon intensity indicator in 2025 from emissions per dollar of gross merchandise sales to emissions per dollar of revenue. Carbon intensity is also evaluated regionally and nationally to isolate geographic variations and implement localized decarbonization interventions across supply chain networks.

## Context

Amazon needs to measure carbon emissions across complex, diverse business operations—spanning retail, logistics, cloud services, manufacturing, and media—to track progress toward its Climate Pledge goal of reaching net-zero carbon by 2040.

## Approach / What changed

Amazon tracks activity-specific carbon intensity metrics, notably emissions per unit shipped for retail operations, and analyzes data at regional and country levels. Decarbonization interventions include electric vehicles, low-carbon fuels, modal shifts such as rail, smarter routing, and updating its economic carbon intensity metric from emissions per dollar of gross merchandise sales to emissions per dollar of revenue.

## Takeaways

- Amazon reduced its retail carbon emissions per unit shipped by 39% by the end of 2025 relative to 2019.
- Decarbonization measures include investments in electric vehicles, carbon-free energy, smarter routing, lighter packaging, low-carbon fuels, and rail transit.
- Amazon updated its economic intensity metric in 2025 from grams of CO2 equivalent per dollar of gross merchandise sales (gCO2e/$GMS) to grams of CO2 equivalent per dollar of revenue (gCO2e/$Revenue).

**Tags:** [Monitoring](https://yomu.fyi/topic/monitoring), [Observability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/observability), [Scalability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/scalability)

- Source: [amazon.science](https://www.amazon.science/news/how-amazon-tracks-carbon-intensity-across-its-operations)
- Source URL: https://www.amazon.science/news/how-amazon-tracks-carbon-intensity-across-its-operations
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-27T15:23:50.501Z

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