Embed Sustainability Into Your Rituals

03. Track your digital footprint

Why does it matter?

Focusing on digital emissions and impact is critical to building a coherent plan to start or accelerate your sustainability journey. Whether you manage a website, a platform or an app, there are different service providers, tools, and platforms to help you measure your impact and build a compelling pathway to sustainability.

What can I do?

Choose the right metrics
Figure out whether you have the resources internally to undertake an initial audit and ongoing measurement, or if you may need to outsource this phase
Start small and grow gradually. Identify the low hanging fruits of your product line/supply chain where you have data available.
Breakdown your product by functional units: a page (e.g. homepage), a user flow, a set of features (e.g. authentication), an API, an AI model, or a squad (e.g. payment)
Identify the top 5 most frequently viewed pages, features, or user flows and measure their page weight and emissions.
It’s better to estimate rather spend a lot of resources and attempt to measure accurately. It’s more important to establish a baseline.
Estimate aggregated page weight and emissions for features or user flows
Estimate emissions from underlying services: APIs, Cloud, and third parties
For websites, there are some great free tools that can help you to get started and measure simple web pages, such as Ecograder or Beacon. You can also get a Digital Ratings or Score using Sustainable Web Design or eco Index - the latter is available only in French.
Other tools offer specific measurements depending on your needs, such as CO2.js for websites, apps, and platforms, Greenframe or Greenspector for user scenarios or web and mobile applications, Step CI for APIs, or Cloud Carbon Footprint for cloud services
You can understand the impact of existing third parties with BuiltWith or Are my third parties green
We recommend that you go with tools designed with companies like yours in mind that offer specialized features for your industry. You can consider, for example fruggr.io, Verdikt, Sopht, Resilio, or Greenframe if you’re ready to invest in a commercial solution
Make sure measurements include impacts from devices, networks, and data centers across their life cycle (manufacturing, distribution, usage, to end of life)
When launching a new service/ product assess expected impact from increasing user adoption, including possible rebound effects and the product’s true consequences.
Compare your metrics against industry benchmarks (such as Software Carbon Intensity from the Green Software Foundation) or competitors if possible
Communicate findings, prioritize the biggest reduction opportunities with your team, and build a roadmap accordingly

What does success look like?

🌍 Collective efforts to gauge and reduce ecological footprints
🌍 Cross-departmental participation in green initiatives

Things to consider

You’ll need to Influence and collaborate with internal stakeholders to perform such audits. Learning how to speak to all departments and understanding how everyone would benefit from knowing more about their digital footprint will be key. Consider securing a budget to hire specialists. Convert sustainability metrics into metrics they care about - speed, cost, security, value etc.

As described above, you’ll find many free and open-source tools and digital-specific carbon accounting companies (this market is growing fast, especially in Europe). Here’s a list of tools and companies the Green Software Foundation recommends. We recommend solutions that can be measured on an ongoing basis and ideally provide tailored recommendations for your product or business.