Code Green London: The impact of cloud computing on environmental sustainability

February 16, 2025

Last month, I attended the Code Green London meetup, which featured two insightful presentations on digital sustainability and carbon emissions.

Measuring Cloud Carbon Emissions

Mark Butcher delivered the first presentation, focusing on measuring cloud carbon emissions. He addressed the key challenge of establishing meaningful metrics in scenarios where cost is not a reliable indicator of environmental impact.

Code Green Slide about Hyperscalers say about sustainability

Code Green Slide showing news reports for what the Hyperscalers really do

His presentation highlighted several critical points for organisations starting their carbon measurement journey:

Establishing a baseline is essential before implementing any changes. This provides a clear starting point for measuring progress.
All decisions about carbon reduction should be based on concrete data rather than assumptions.
Organisations should recognize that no single key performance indicator (KPI) can capture the full picture of cloud carbon emissions.
Finally, and perhaps most practically, teams need to share environmental impact data in places where staff regularly look and work.

Looking at the whole of IT across an orgnisation

The Tech Carbon Standard

The second speaker, Oliver Cronk, presented on the Tech Carbon Standard, providing a clear breakdown of digital technology’s environmental impact across three main areas:

The Technology Carbon Standard — _{Technology Carbon Standard by Scott Logic is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0}

Upstream emissions encompass the environmental costs of open-source software development, hardware manufacturing, and system installation.
Operational emissions include both direct and indirect carbon output from software usage and cloud services.
Downstream emissions account for end-user impact, including device usage, network requirements, and supporting infrastructure.

The Code Green London Meetup

The evening concluded with an engaging discussion about AI and sustainability, particularly focusing on recent DeepSeek developments, which have been making headlines.

This meetup effectively highlighted to me how digital sustainability requires careful consideration across multiple areas of technology implementation and use. And I really enjoyed hearing about the practical steps organisations can take to reduce their environmental impact.