Kara Hurst

Kara Hurst is the Chief Sustainability Officer at Amazon. In this role, she leads the worldwide teams working on environmental sustainability and social responsibility across the company. Kara joined Amazon in 2014 to build its sustainability roadmap and now oversees the company’s evolution toward more sustainable operations, transportation, products, and packaging, as well as its efforts around water stewardship, and reduced waste. Under her leadership, Amazon announced its commitment to be net-zero carbon by 2040 and co-founded The Climate Pledge, which now has over 500 signatories.

Throughout her career, Kara has held a variety of executive roles in sustainability, technology, and community programs. Prior to joining Amazon, Kara was CEO of The Sustainability Consortium (TSC), a multi-sector group across academia, the retail industry, and the public sector. TSC was named one of Scientific American's "Top Ten World Changing Ideas" of 2012. For eleven years before that, Hurst worked as Vice President of BSR, where she built several global industry practices and lead BSR's New York and Washington D.C. offices, as well as the global partnership practice with governments, multilateral organizations and foundations. Hurst also co-founded of the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC, now the Responsible Business Alliance) and worked in Silicon Valley as Executive Director of the public-private venture OpenVoice. Kara began her career working in public service, first with for the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) and later for Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco.

Kara holds an undergraduate degree from Barnard College of Columbia University and a Master of Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley.

She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Water.org and Stolen Youth.