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.

To better understand the dramatic increase in Amazon’s dock-to-door emissions, let’s break the data down by each mode of transport.

Even though inbound maritime shipping holds the smallest share of Amazon emissions corresponding with U.S. shipping and deliveries, between 2019-2023, Amazon expanded its U.S. inbound maritime shipping carbon dioxide emissions by 26%.

At current growth rates, maritime shipping could represent as much as 17% of global human-caused carbon emissions by 2050. Without the rapid decarbonization of this sector, meeting a 1.5°C target will be impossible. As such, each company engaged in ocean shipping must take accountability for its maritime emissions in order to catalyze the necessary transition to zero emissions vessels (ZEVs).

Amazon has deliberately expanded fast and dirty air freight shipping, which is the largest source of Amazon Logistics U.S. emissions and significant contributor overall transportation emissions growth.

From 2019 to 2023, Amazon has increased its U.S. inbound and domestic air freight pollution by 67% to nearly 2.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2023, representing an average annual growth rate of 15%. That is as much carbon pollution as is generated to power 500,000 U.S. households.

Amazon has no plan to curb growing heavy-duty trucking emissions, which comprise more than a third of a package’s carbon pollution.

Since 2019, the company’s U.S. heavy-duty and drayage trucking carbon dioxide emissions grew at an estimated average annual growth rate of 19%, or 51% total growth for the whole period.

Amazon is using weak last-mile electric vehicle commitment to distract from over 190% increase in delivery van emissions since 2019.

The Climate Pledge has failed to slow the company’s meteoric rise in last-mile delivery emissions. Over the last five years, Amazon has expanded its carbon emissions in the last mile at an AAGR of 37% during the period 2019-2023, or 190% simple growth from 408,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2019 to 1.2 million metric tons in 2023. Last year, the company quietly backed out of its Shipment Zero initiative to make 50% of its shipments net-zero by 2030, further demonstrating its lack of seriousness.