Key concepts

Described below are the key concepts and terms that apply to all visualizations within the AWS Sustainability console and the corresponding API.

Unit of measure

The unit of measurement for carbon emissions is metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent (MTCO2e), an industry-standard measure. This measurement considers multiple greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. All greenhouse gas emissions are converted to MTCO2e using their respective Global Warming Potential (GWP) values as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This standardized approach enables organizations to express the climate impact of various greenhouse gases in a single, comparable unit.

Publishing timing

Carbon emissions data is available back to January 2022, though we limit how many records are displayed in the Carbon emissions page to maintain legibility of the data (the full historical dataset can be accessed via API or Data Exports). New data is published monthly by the 21st of the month following the usage (e.g. January data is published by February 21st).

Data resolution

The AWS Sustainability service shows your carbon footprint at the 0.000001 MTCO2e (1 gram CO2e) resolution. If your emissions are lower than 0.0000005 MTCO2e (0.5 gMTCO2e) in the reporting month, it will appear as 0.

AWS Region

AWS services are hosted in multiple locations world-wide. These locations are composed of AWS Regions, Availability Zones, Local Zones, and Wavelength Zones. Each Region is a separate geographic area. The AWS Sustainability service shows the environmental impact associated with each applicable AWS Region. For example, US East (Ohio), Europe (London). Emissions from global services, such as Amazon CloudFront, are reported under Global.

Services

AWS offers a broad set of services including compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security, and enterprise applications. The AWS Sustainability service metrics include impact from all AWS Services. Currently, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon CloudFront are broken out in the AWS Sustainability console, while all other products are displayed as Other.

Fiscal year

By default, the AWS Sustainability service uses calendar year (January to December) for quarter and year aggregations. You can customize your own fiscal year if it differs from calendar year, for example, March to February. The label for this field corresponds to the year of the ending month. For example, a fiscal year that runs from March 2025 to February 2026 will be shown as FY 2026. Fiscal quarters are calculated from the fiscal year starting month. For example, for a fiscal year that runs from March 2025 to February 2026, Q1 will be March, April, and May 2025.

Methodology version

The environmental data presented in the AWS Sustainability service reflects the most recent methodology version available for a given month. When AWS releases a new version of the methodology, the release notes page is updated with information about the changes and historical data is recalculated using the updated version to ensure accurate comparisons over time. If you want to keep data calculated using previous versions of the methodology we recommend creating a Data Export, which exports your carbon data to Amazon S3. When a new version is released it has its own prefix and previous versions remain available.

AWS Organizations

If you're signed in as a management account of AWS Organizations, the AWS Sustainability service will report the consolidated environmental impact of all the member accounts within that management account, for the duration that those member accounts were a part of your organization. The field usage account shows the breakdown of each account with usage within the management account, so you can understand where your environmental impact comes from.

If you're signed in as a member account, the AWS Sustainability service will report emission data for the member account only.