📈 #29 OR in action: How Amazon is fueling Europe's drive to zero emissions

Without the right charging points, we're stuck. Here's the tech fix we've been waiting for.

The European Union's ambitious goal to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 necessitates significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, particularly within the transportation sector.

Amazon plays a key role here: it’s one of the companies that make those emissions and, at the same time, developed a tool that provides a means to strategically deploy electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure across Europe and support the logistics industry's shift towards electric trucks.

Alongside vehicle electrification, improving fuel efficiency, and promoting sustainable transportation modes, initiatives like CHALET underscore the critical need for innovative solutions and collaborative efforts to drive the decarbonization of transportation and help Europe reach its environmental targets.

Today in Feasible you’ll see:

• Ways of going climate-neutral by 2050 in European Union

• Why electrifying vehicles is the biggest step on that objective

• How can Operations Research help on that quest by setting up an strategic plan for the next 30 years

Let’s go for it!

🌱 Climate-neutral by 2050

The European Union has an ambitious goal by 2050: becoming climate neutral.

This means achieving a balance between the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced and the amount removed from the atmosphere. By 2050, the EU aims to ensure that any emissions released are fully offset by absorbing an equivalent amount from the atmosphere, effectively bringing net emissions to zero.

How can it be achieved? Mainly by two specific actions:

• Dramatic reductions in emissions. This entails significantly cutting emissions across all major sectors, including energy, transportation, industry, agriculture, and buildings. It involves transitioning to renewable energy sources, enhancing energy efficiency, electrifying transportation, and adopting sustainable practices across industries.

• Carbon sequestration. Beyond reducing emissions, the strategy involves enhancing and expanding natural carbon sinks, such as forests and wetlands, which absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. It also includes exploring technological solutions for carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon capture and utilization (CCU) to remove CO2 directly from the atmosphere or prevent it from reaching the atmosphere from emission sources.

This goal is central to the European Green Deal, which outlines the EU's strategy to become the world's first climate-neutral continent and is part of the EU's commitment to the Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change.

Achieving climate neutrality involves a comprehensive approach that also includes other initiatives like circular economy to reduce waste, policy and regulatory measures to drive the transition, and international cooperation to promote global climate action, among others.

Look.

The EU is doing a lot of efforts around this. But if the trend continues, I don’t know if those ambitious goals will be achieved. There’s been a cut in the emissions of around 30% in the last 30 years, going from 4.66 millions of kilotons in 1991 to 3.24 millions of kilotons in 2021:

So following the same amount of reduction for the next 30 years, that same 30% reduction means we’ll still be emiting 2.27 millions of kilotons by 2051, one year after the objective. Will that be enough?

Time will tell.

But if I had to focus on something, I would order all the sectors contributing to greenhouse gas emissiosn and select the ones with high values. You can find several statistics and all of them say exactly the same thing: