By Janus Boye
As you might already know from following our work, the information communications technology (ICT) sector contributes ~4% of global greenhouse gas emissions – this is equivalent to global aviation.
In a recent member call we were joined by Leah Goldfarb from cloud hosting platform Platform.sh, and she explored how to reduce your carbon footprint in the cloud quantitatively. She also unpacked what information is needed for a carbon audit in the cloud, Platform.sh’s approach to carbon calculations, and concluded with how a shared-responsibility model will help us minimise carbon emissions.
Leah works as Environmental Impact Officer at Platform.sh in Paris. She is a certified Climate Leader and belongs to the “Climate Reality Leadership Corps”. Al Gore, the 2007 Nobel Prize winner, trained Leah to give informative presentations on climate change and how to address this issue, which affects all of us.
As per tradition in many of our calls: Let’s start with ‘why’.
Why you don’t need another server
To quote Leah:
“The importance of full carbon emissions accounting, including virtual assets, has become the norm and is set to be an environmental compliance issue going forward.”
These changes are superimposed on a changing regulatory landscape, e.g. the EU’s Green Deal and starting in 2024, large EU companies (>250 employees and a €40 million turnover) must publicly disclose how they operate and manage social and environmental risks through the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). This Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting standard aims to end greenwashing and lay the groundwork for sustainability reporting standards at the global level.
One area that is covered in CSRD is carbon reporting. But how do you report emissions from IT sources, particularly in the cloud? Let’s first move onto the role of the many vendors, agencies and customers in the IT community at large.
Role of the IT community
In the call, Leah shared the slide below, which shows how the total global carbon footprint for ICT is increasing rapidly. Even at the lowest projection, it’s still expected to rise from 4% of total global footprint in 2020 to 7% in 2040.
We’ve written extensively about this topic during the past year. Here’s a few posts to get started:
Towards a fossil-free Internet (December 2022)
Waste is the business case of big tech (May 2022)
Website sustainability score (May 2022)
In the call, we also briefly touched on the differences between carbon impact on hosting in the cloud versus on premise. Leah mentioned that it is widely recognised that cloud computing is more climate friendly with research showing that it reduces greenhouse gas emission between 30% and 90%.
She also pointed us to Cloud Carbon Footprint - an open source tool to measure and analyse your cloud carbon emissions.
What is cloud carbon auditing
To illustrate the approach to cloud carbon auditing, Leah shared the below slide which illustrates what is in scope and what is outside.
The asterisk denotes that this is as defined by Greenly, the carbon auditor that Platform.sh is using.
Leah also reminded us that this is an emerging practice and the research is still at an early stage. She asked us to consider that:
A location-based approach is the standard in carbon accounting
It is a process: transparency is a necessity
An accredited auditor should use GHG Protocol for carbon accounting
Finally, processes will probably change as new peer-reviewed research is published on this.
Hyperscalers’ communication
We then moved onto the big guys, specifically Amazon, Google, Microsoft and some of the other large cloud service providers and discussed the timeline below on what they have communicated so far.
As you can see, AWS is committed to being carbon neutral in 10+ years, with some caveats, while Microsoft has communicated a promise of being Net Zero by 2030.
Leah also shared a world map with a snapshot of carbon intensity from electricity production in June last year. This showed Norway and Sweden coloured in green to illustrate low carbon usage and other parts of the world, notably Poland and parts of the US and Australia in red, noting very high carbon usage. Here’s just a few numbers from the snapshot which shows the big difference in carbon consumption based on where your cloud is based:
Quebec, Canada: 27g
Paris, France: 58g
Stockholm, Sweden: 62g
Charleston, South Carolina: 480g
Dublin, Ireland: 482g
Sydney, Australia: 867g
If you are curious about updated numbers, then check out these Electricity Maps.
Introducing MODE Strategy
As the final part of the call, Leah introduced us to Platform.sh’s MODE strategy, which is based on these four elements:
Measure: Carbon auditing and being committed to reducing carbon emissions, also of our clients
Optimise: It’s a shared responsibility, but this means focusing on density, application performance monitoring (APM), optimising performance and generally using fewer resources as to lower electricity usage
Deploy to greener regions. Remember that carbon intensity can vary in time and it’s important to have a location-based, rather than market-based approach. Platform.sh provides customers with full transparency on the underlying carbon intensity of the region’s electricity grid provider
Educate. Remember carbon auditing is in its infancy and Leah shared an example of how the carbon auditors recently learned that network is less resource-intensive than originally believed
Learn more about environmentally friendly digital leadership
The conversation naturally continues in our peer groups and at our conferences.
At the UX Connect 23 conference in Aarhus in June, we focus on sustainability and James Cannings and Thorsten Jonas are among our confirmed speakers. See you there!
You can also download the slides (PDF) or lean back and enjoy the entire recording.