EDITOR ’ S QUESTION

According to Bloomberg , by 2030 the IT industry could account for 20 % of the worldwide energy drain , which if not met by renewable energy sources would result in a stark increase in carbon emissions . Environmental costs , of course , are not just limited to the running of systems – equipment

manufacturing is significant in its own right . In fact , technology is one of the most polluting industries in the world . While many companies are still assessing the costs of going green , those which have made the transition are finding that efficient software platforms are actually cheaper and provide better experiences as well . There ’ s software platform produces . This is now changing and perhaps the best evidence of this is that the three major cloud technology providers ( AWS , Azure and GCP ) are reporting the emissions produced by the consumption of their resources by individual customers . Whilst this is a step in the right direction , none of these cloud providers give businesses a way to calculate the amount of future carbon emissions they might produce , so it is challenging for IT leaders to know which business decisions to make in order to reduce those emissions .

I published an article in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ( IEEE ) magazine , which proposes a framework for estimating the CO 2 emissions that software platforms produce over the course of a year . Using this framework , two nominally similar technologies are compared against each other , showing that the more efficient platform reduces cost by 79 % and CO 2 emissions by 84 %. That difference is 569 metric tons of CO 2 per year , the same amount of CO 2 that 57 hectares of trees absorb in a year !

GOING BEYOND THIS , THE IT INDUSTRY MIGHT CONSIDER A UNIVERSAL

CO 2

EMISSIONS METRIC THAT MEASURES DIFFERENT TECHNOLOGIES BASED ON CO 2

EMISSIONS . a great opportunity for IT companies to adopt more efficient technologies and create a win-win situation for both their business and the planet .

Until recently there was no way of measuring the amount of CO 2 emissions that a

A framework such as this can also be used to compare other similar technologies . Going beyond this , the IT industry might consider a universal CO 2 emissions metric that measures different technologies based on CO 2 emissions . Such a metric would allow IT decision-makers to incorporate environmental considerations when choosing technology components . It would also encourage technology vendors to reduce the environmental impact of their products . The results also show that when reducing environmental impact , you can also reduce costs – we don ’ t necessarily have to choose between one or the other . We can satisfy our budgets and our consciences at the same time .

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