Working together with partners

The public sector plays a critical role in sustainability and climate action. We’re building tools to advance sustainability by unlocking data and informing long-term planning for governments and intergovernmental organizations.

Our Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE) makes actionable climate data available to more than 40,000 cities and regions worldwide - including 7,000 in Europe. Over a thousand cities globally have signed up to view their data and utilize the insights for their GHG inventories and climate action planning.

Google has also worked with several cities to capture hyperlocal air quality insights used to help improve the lives and health of residents. For example, we used an electric Street View car to capture air quality measurements in Dublin, Ireland street-by-street.

Another effort, Project Green Light, uses Google Maps driving trends to reduce stop-and-go traffic and emissions, and is showing promising results. In our most recent tests in Hamburg, Germany, cars made over 25% fewer stops, resulting in approximately 10% fewer emissions at intersections where Project Green Light technology was deployed.¹ We’re now bringing this technology to cities on four continents.

In response to the increasing frequency and severity of devastating wildfires and flooding, Google has developed new technology to help governments, aid organizations, and communities take timely action. Our wildfire detection and prediction feature maps wildfires in near real time using satellite data. The Google Flood Forecasting Initiative uses AI to predict when and where riverine flooding will occur. These actionable early warning systems help to save both lives and livelihoods.

According to a recent Google survey, 82% of consumers said sustainability was more top of mind in 2021 than it was before COVID-19 and 78% said that big businesses have a role to play in helping to fight climate change.² We’re collaborating with partners and customers across a number of sectors—including energy, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, consumer goods, and financial services—to work towards sustainability goals.

Our Carbon Sense Suite enables customers to accurately measure, report, and reduce their cloud-related carbon emissions.

Many of our commercial customers are eager to assess and improve their resilience to climate change, and Google is helping organizations integrate climate data and geospatial analysis into business strategy and risk management.

Google Cloud, in partnership with NGIS, is also helping brands gain a deeper understanding of sustainable sourcing practices across supplier networks, so they can improve supplier performance and compliance in the fight against deforestation.

In addition, we’re helping organizations harness the power of data and AI to drive more intelligent logistics operations and supply chains, make solar potential estimations faster and easier, and wind energy more economically attractive.

Our research teams and many researchers and academics around the world are continuing to make advances in the most complex areas of the field, applying AI, machine learning and geospatial analytics at global scale to accelerate the shift to a more sustainable future.

All over the world, scientists, researchers, and developers have been using Google Earth Engine for more than a decade to detect changes, map trends, and quantify differences on the Earth's surface. Over 50,000 scientific researchers regularly use Earth Engine's data analytics for research and educational purposes.

We also developed Data Commons to organize sustainability data from 100+ sources - emissions, water, food, health, and housing - and make it available to policy makers and other decision makers, researchers, and journalists around the globe to act on. Today, Data Commons is one of the world's largest knowledge graphs on sustainability.

Wildlife Insights, a platform launched in 2019 by Google Earth Outreach and seven leading conservation organizations, helps conservationists and scientists share, identify, and manage wildlife images online. The platform is designed to make it easier to collect and analyze data from remote cameras, which are often used to monitor wildlife populations across the globe, and inform data-driven decisions to address the biodiversity crisis.

Conservation technology nonprofit SkyTruth is using Google Maps Platform, Earth Engine, Dynamic World, machine learning, and cloud computing to monitor environmental impacts. One of SkyTruth’s projects, Cerulean, uses artificial intelligence to analyze thousands of radar satellite images every day, scanning the world’s oceans for the tell-tale signs of oil slicks from vessels, offshore oil platforms, and other sources, creating a global map of oil pollution and identifying polluters around the world.

By investing in breakthrough innovations, we’re able to make quicker progress on sustainability and climate solutions. For example, through our research teams and moonshots in X—our technology incubator—we’re developing innovative solutions to sustainability challenges and opportunities such as clean energy, urban planning, natural disaster forecasting, and agriculture and aquaculture.

Through Google.org, we’re supporting ambitious projects like our Impact Challenge on Climate Innovation, which allocates $30 million to support breakthrough projects that use data and technology to accelerate climate action. Selected organizations will receive funding to scale their activities, along with access to Google’s technical expertise and products to help them maximize their impact.

AI for the Global Goals provides $25 million in funding to support the development of new AI-driven approaches that accelerate progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The Environmental Justice Data Fund is a collection of grants totaling nearly $9 million that aim to help frontline communities that have been historically underserved and disproportionately impacted by climate change and environmental injustice.

We also have a large portfolio of sustainability-focused accelerators, all of which support early stage innovations to grow and scale. Our Google for Startups Accelerator: Climate Change identifies, supports, and scales startups that are focused on building technologies to combat climate change.

Through our Startups for Sustainable Development program, we’re working with impact-driven startups using technology to help build a more sustainable future and address one or more of the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The program has evolved, and now supports close to 400 startups in over 60 countries, working with a network of over 140 partner organizations.