Methodology Paper on the Environmental Footprint of Digital Services Published

As part of the ECO:DIGIT research project, the project partners from the Öko-Institut e.V. have developed a comprehensive "Methodology for Determining the Environmental Impacts of Digital Services," now available for download on the project website. The aim of this methodology is to enable a transparent assessment of the energy and resource consumption of software applications, cloud services, and other digital services. It takes into account the complexity of digital services, which are often distributed across various devices and networks and only used partially. The methodology establishes the link between the use of digital basic resources (e.g., computing power, storage, data transfer) and the resulting environmental impacts.

In addition to energy consumption, material and resource usage are also factored into the assessment, providing a holistic view of the environmental impacts.

This methodology forms the foundation for the development of a test bed that enables software to be tested on various virtualized hardware platforms and its environmental footprint to be assessed.

In the long term, ECO:DIGIT aims to establish this methodology as an international standard, giving companies and organizations worldwide the ability to transparently and comparably assess the environmental footprint of their digital services.

More information and the full paper can be found here.