What’s the problem? 

There is no clear and easy way to evaluate the carbon footprint of a digital service. The need for such a measure came up in our user research and was top of the STAR team’s wish list.

“
“There are no models out there at the moment that suppliers consistently use to attribute carbon footprint to their services.”
- Digital and technology lead in health and care
“
“It would help with decision making if we could quantify the impacts of digital over non-digital. I don't like going, ‘Oh well, it's probably better.’ I like to be able to prove it."  
- Digital and technology lead in central administration

There are other carbon footprint measures within the public sector that could translate to digital. 

Being able to measure the footprint of a digital service will help public servants to: 

  • support decision-making and trade offs 
  • strengthen the case for investment in digital delivery 
  • report emissions more accurately 

Read more in our research findings about this problem: 

Potential solutions 

In our conversation with the STAR team, it emerged that measuring the full carbon footprint of a digital service remains something even the best practitioners find difficult. In 2019, the Government Digital Service tried to do so but hit a barrier in finding information. 

Since 2019, the large public cloud providers have all announced carbon footprint reporting or released it to their service dashboards, making their services easier to evaluate. Examples include: 

However, even these features measure only part of a digital service’s overall footprint, as client devices (for example, a mobile phone or laptop) and internet transit (wireless and cable networks) are not included. 

Possible approaches to solving this problem include providing: 

  • standards for measuring a digital carbon footprint 
  • examples of measuring the footprint of a service end to end, across channels  
  • guidance on measuring the climate footprint of legacy IT systems  
  • guidance on comparing the climate impact of digital and off-line services