If Amazon can’t solve its carbon emissions problem, who can?

Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world, commanding vast resources, a sprawling logistics network and enormous purchasing power. That scale is precisely why questions about its ability to meet its own net-zero emissions pledge carry outsized weight.

The company has previously committed to eliminating its carbon emissions as part of broader climate commitments made by major corporations in recent years. Whether Amazon can deliver on that pledge is now facing renewed scrutiny, given the complexity of decarbonizing an operation that spans everything from delivery vehicles and warehouses to cloud computing infrastructure.

If a company with Amazon’s scale, capital and logistical sophistication struggles to chart a credible path to eliminating emissions, it raises a broader question about what standard should be expected of other large companies making similar pledges.

A test case for corporate climate pledges

Amazon’s emissions footprint spans multiple sectors simultaneously — transportation, data centers, warehousing and third-party logistics — making its net-zero commitment one of the more complex corporate climate pledges to evaluate.

How the company addresses the gap between its stated ambitions and its emissions trajectory will likely be watched closely as a bellwether for whether large-scale corporate net-zero commitments can be met in practice.