Carbon Footprint Tracker And Satellite Imagery Suite

Subject – Environment

Context – Carbon footprint tracker and satellite imagery suite unveiled by Google Cloud

Concept –

Alphabet Inc’s Google will tell its cloud customers the carbon emissions of their cloud usage and open satellite imagery to them for the first time for environmental analysis, as part of a push to help companies track and cut carbon budgets
The leading cloud vendors Google, Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com have been competing on sustainability offerings for years.
- They aim to serve companies that are under pressure from stakeholders to rethink operations in light of climate change.
Google’s new carbon footprint reporting tool, similar to one Microsoft already provides, shows the emissions associated with the electricity that was used to store and process a customer’s data.
In addition, Google will now warn customers when they are wasting energy on inactive cloud services.
The new mapping offering, Google Earth Engine, had been used by tens of thousands of researchers, governments and advocacy groups since 2009. But Google now is letting businesses in on the service, which includes many huge geospatial datasets such as Landsat and the software needed to analyse them.
- Amazon has a similar initiative.
Earth Engine could help ensure supply chains are sustainable and predict operation challenges from extreme weather, according to Google.