IT sustainability: Why we’re still waiting for quantified emissions reductions

Mattie Yeta, chief sustainability officer at consultancy CGI, adds that not all sectors of a supply chain in which an organisation has business partners as yet have appropriate standards with which to comply.

Think about the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTI), which is only a few years old. Its methodologies and standards are new, and as yet it does not have standards for example for oil and gas – pretty crucial for energy-related calculations.

“Standards are needed to support different industries and SBTI are creating one for oil and gas at the moment. In their defence, oil and gas is complicated and they’ve got to go through a whole process, gathering insights and feedback,” Yeta notes.

That’s before approval and publication. If an organisation within the value chain cannot provide partners with a validated, net-zero compliant standard and can quantify emissions based on that, “you can be stuck”, she says.

A lack of leadership at corporate and board level, limiting pervasiveness of emissions reduction accountability can pile on top, ultimately affecting resources available to various teams. Yeta says a true willingness to want “to do the right thing beyond profit” can also be missing.

“If you’ve got a one- or even a half-person team who’s half marketing, half net-zero, it’s likely never going do the job the right way,” she adds.

Technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) or data insights could help to reduce burdens. Think about how many organisations expense their travel with PDF or spreadsheets: data in incompatible formats can become more granular with AI.

When you’re trying to demonstrate a 1.5 linear degree reduction in relation to a specific percentage, you may need every single time reduction to count, Yeta notes.

“AI can read it all straight, then pull it all into a table. Some have not fully tapped into what technology can do for them to help them report accurately and therefore they give up because it feels quite hard.”

But Yeta says governments should incentivise more change. When organisations have tough decisions to make in the current economic climate and challenges beyond climate change, more stick or carrot can shift priorities.

“It is the right thing to do. We’ve got a UK Climate Act, organisations have to submit their carbon reduction plans, but we’re talking about a global challenge,” she says.

The sense that ongoing resource use expansion is holding greater sustainability back is partly testified to by Benjamin Brial, founder of devops platform provider Cycloid.io.

“This can be really about infrastructures. A lot of people, just like in the IT world, speak about decreasing carbon footprint,” Brial says. “But just in France, for example, you have around 20 new datacentres under construction that don’t have authorisation to be connected because of the power they’re requesting from the electricity grid.”

Another example is the footprint of burgeoning chatbot implementations, and more transparency is required from cloud providers too, beyond the “sexy” projects they often want to promote. Certainly there has been too much greenwash, which can be quickly uncovered when questions start being asked about budget and resources.

“And they say, ‘Yeah, we have an intern’ and they’re a big company,” Brial says. “Someone may wear a hat that puts some message on LinkedIn, but when you deep-dive, they don’t have any budget.”

He adds that the good news is that people are talking about carbon footprint now, which many in the industry were not when it comes to cloud or FinOps until about mid-2023; only now is the trend becoming tangible among Cycloid customers. In that sense, it is still early days for concrete emissions reduction results, although at least now some evangelisation is happening on the FinOps side and regulation is going in the right direction, he says.

“I never saw leaders coming to us saying they want to calculate their carbon footprint for their IT department,” Brial says. “One problem is it’s really vague, and there are other problems – on our side, we focus on infrastructures, but you have people who focus on software, and that’s problematic.”

The problem “for now” remains carbon accounting globally, with software for instance using “shortcuts” when working with carbon footprint and generalised approaches involving multiple criteria such as water use and so on, rather than being very specific.

Similarly, the focus on ESG reports can divert resource from actually taking action, which is surely more important, Brial agrees.

Certainly the market is developing. “We are about to integrate the mapping with the electricity map, where you are going to visualise and get inside your calculation, the real carbon footprint, depending on the kind of electricity you use,” Brial adds. “You have 50% decarbonised inside France, but it’s not always 50%, depending on if it’s nuclear or renewable energy and stuff like this.”