Amid increasing calls for addressing climate change all across the world, pledges for big investments on green energy have been made by a host of the largest companies of the world such as Amazon and Google.

While Amazon has set a target to become carbon neutral by 2040, Google pledged to make record breaking renewable energy purchases.

These announcements were made on Friday, the day that was marked as a day of climate action which saw strikes being organized all across the globe and children and students from more than 150 countries joined in protest in their respective countries.

New climate initiatives which included the pledge to transform the company into a carbon neutral one and the meeting of the goals set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement by 2040, were outlined by Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos on Friday before the demonstrations by the children. In order to reduce its fuel consumption and related pollution, Amazon has ordered 100,000 electric delivery vehicles so that it is able to meet its target, said the e-commerce giant. The vehicles would be pressed into service from 2021. The company aims to be able to meet the targets set in the Paris agreement at least 10 years before they are supposed to be achieved.

However despite these assurances, a section of Amazon employees are of the opinion that the company has not done enough. A “walkout” protest on Friday was organized by more than 1,500 workers of the company to protest against the bad environmental record of the company.

Speaking on eth same issue on Thursday, Google said it would make the “biggest corporate purchase of renewable energy in history” in the form of a series of new solar and energy deals. Investing more than $2bn in new energy infrastructure which would include millions of solar panels and hundreds of wind turbines, would be included in the agreements, said Google’s chief executive Sundar Pichai.

“Once all these projects come online, our carbon-free energy portfolio will produce more electricity than places like Washington DC or entire countries like Lithuania or Uruguay use each year,” Pichai said in a blog post.

Promise for going green has also been made by Swedish furniture retailer Ikea. The company would be able to beat its 2020 target to produce as much renewable energy as it consumes because of the recent investments it has made in solar energy production, said Ingka Group – which owns most Ikea stores. It said that it has purchased a stake in two US solar parks recently and has already made investments ot tune of billions in setting up wind farms and solar panels at its stores.

The company would continue to invest in solar parks and wind farms, said the company’s Chief executive Jesper Brodin in an interview pot the news agency Reuters. “Being climate smart is not an added cost. It’s actually smart business and what the business model of the future will look like… Everything around fossil fuels and daft use of resources will be expensive,” Mr Brodin said.

(Adapted from BBC.com)

Categories: Creativity, Economy & Finance, Geopolitics, Regulations & Legal, Strategy, Sustainability, Uncategorized