Why cloud emissions are a critical gap and why now
Cloud infrastructure remains a major challenge in carbon reporting, particularly for companies with large AWS footprints. Sweep and Capgemini found that 61% of sustainability leaders spend more than four hours a week consolidating emissions data.
That burden is growing as CSRD, UK SRS, ISSB and California’s SB 253 expand Scope 3 reporting requirements.
AWS Sustainability gives companies programmatic access to Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions data by service, region and account. Sweep’s connector automatically integrates that data into a company’s carbon baseline, eliminating manual exports and spreadsheets.
What you get: emissions data broken down by service, region, and account
The AWS Sustainability Console provides carbon emissions data across:
- Scope 1: direct emissions from AWS operations
- Scope 2 (location-based and market-based): indirect emissions from energy consumption, with or without renewable energy certificates (RECs) or Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs)
- Scope 3: upstream and downstream value chain emissions
All of this flows into Sweep broken down by AWS service (e.g. EC2, S3), region, and account, giving you the granularity needed to identify your cloud emissions hotspots and track progress over time.
How the integration works
Sweep automatically imports emissions data from AWS Sustainability using Amazon S3, with support for AWS emission factor versioning and near real-time processing. The integration is compatible with existing AWS infrastructure, including Redshift and Athena, as well as platforms like Snowflake and Microsoft SQL Server.
Setup overview
To configure the integration, you will need:
- Access to your AWS management account
- Permission to create S3 buckets, IAM users and BCM Data Exports
- Terraform installed (recommended for infrastructure-as-code setup)
The setup process includes:
- Creating an S3 bucket to store AWS carbon emissions exports
- Configuring a BCM Data Export to send emissions data to that bucket
- Creating a read-only IAM user for Sweep
- Connecting the export to Sweep through the AWS connector
- Applying a transformation rule to map AWS emissions data into Sweep’s data model
The integration supports Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions data by service, region and account. Sweep recommends using location-based emissions values (LBM) by default, though market-based values (MBM) are also supported.
Important notes
- AWS emissions data is usually published after the reporting month ends
- AWS exports include account IDs, not account names
- Filtering imports by account is not currently supported at connector level
- The AWS Sustainability Console connector replaces the legacy AWS Cloud Carbon Footprint (CCF) connector