Carbon Footprint in the Cloud

Working in a cloud-based environment gives technology-oriented companies a lot of freedom, improves development speed, and helps with fast delivery of products. On the other hand, technology is impacting our environment, for example by increasing CO₂ emissions.

Mateusz Trojak

Published in

Brainly Technology Blog

5 min readFeb 13, 2023

Before moving forward, we need to understand some basic concepts related to greenhouse gas emissions.

Greenhouse Gas Protocol

The GHG Protocol¹ was developed at the end of the XX century, right about the time when society started to think about global climate change and what impact we have on it. GHG Protocol establishes a global standardized framework to help measure and manage greenhouse emissions.

The GHG framework proposed 3 scopes² of gas emission:

Scope 1
Direct emissions from company-owned and controlled resources. It includes vehicles owned by a company, heating sources, any industrial processes that produce CO₂ and other gasses.

Scope 2
Indirect emissions (owned), including purchased electricity, steam, heat, and cooling.

Scope 3
Indirect emissions (not owned) includes all other emissions not included in Scope 2, and it’s directly connected with company operations. More information can be found on the Planet Earth website², but in general, this scope is directly related to the cloud.

What is the carbon footprint?

Carbon footprint is one of the most well-known metrics when it comes to measuring sustainability. As most technology-oriented activities (transportation, manufacturing, energy production, and consumption, etc.) release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it’s important to measure it and look for opportunities to lower its volume.

The Nature Conservancy³ definition of carbon footprint:

“A Carbon Footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gasses (including carbon dioxide and methane) that are generated by our actions (CO₂e).”

Having some knowledge about greenhouse gas emission definitions, let’s move on to carbon footprint in the cloud.

Carbon Footprint in the Cloud

As the subject of carbon footprint is receiving more focus every year, Cloud providers are continuously working in that area to better track, measure, and lower emissions of greenhouse gasses.

In 2022 AWS added a Sustainability pillar in the Well-Architected framework⁴. This helps companies make decisions to build and implement infrastructure with the lowest possible carbon footprint. A good example here is that organizations can choose where infrastructure will be deployed (AWS Region) based on the green energy⁵ data.

It’s worth mentioning that main cloud providers are getting more and more transparent in their gas emission activities and sustainability in general (e.g., AWS⁹ and Google¹⁰). They are working to replace their electricity supply chains by building their own wind or solar farms. This will help to lower CO₂ emissions and address Scope 3 emissions from Greenhouse Gas Protocol.

It’s not only cloud providers that see benefits in sharing carbon footprint information with their customers. SaaS-based companies like Cloudflare⁶, Snowflake⁷ or CSC Global⁸ are committed to sustainability by proactively working on reducing CO₂ emissions and giving customers an overview of their own gas emissions.

Measuring Carbon Footprint in the Cloud

To understand the carbon footprint of a given solution, it is important to track and measure it. Cloud providers offer tools to track carbon footprint generated by customers. This is a good example of how sustainability awareness can grow in organizations, companies, and corporations.

In 2022, AWS introduced its Customer Carbon Footprint Tool¹¹ which helps organizations to track their carbon footprint. It’s a rather general overview and lacks advanced features but knowing AWS, we can expect that it will develop over time.

In 2021, Google Cloud introduced a Carbon Footprint¹² panel where customers can get even more granular information about their carbon emissions. This information panel helps track greenhouse emissions based on a Google Cloud project or a specific service.

There are also open source tools like Cloud Carbon Footprint¹³ which in one place gathers metrics for major cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and brings even more visibility and trackability. This type of solution gives organizations the opportunity to implement observability and measurement of CO₂e on a team or product level.

Why this is important

There are 2 dimensions with respect to why managing and measuring greenhouse emissions are important for organizations:

Future of the planet
How our actions as humans impact our environment and how technology can help us to achieve better sustainability etc.

Regulations
In the case of Europe-based companies, the European Union, as a part of ITC standardization¹⁴, prepared a taxonomy¹⁵ for sustainable activities. As the European Commission wrote¹⁶:

“The EU taxonomy would provide companies, investors and policymakers with appropriate definitions for which economic activities can be considered environmentally sustainable.”

This means that companies will have to take into account sustainability as a part of their business responsibility, provided by transparency in decisions and actions.

Final thoughts

Sustainability isn’t a buzzword anymore, and the complexity of this multidimensional issue isn’t a simple equation. As legal regulations are getting more important in the greenhouse gas emissions area and societal awareness is getting better around sustainability topics, cloud providers look for more opportunities to implement solutions to decrease carbon footprint.

This article just tackles the subject of carbon footprint in the cloud. A number of other dimensions and deeper analysis shows that this subject needs better understanding, definitions, and overall transparency.