search

ScottLogic / Technology-Carbon-Standard

A proposed Technology Carbon Standard that aims to provide a unified standard for understanding, quantifying, and reducing carbon emissions from an organisation's technology landscape. A component of a holistic Technology Sustainability Framework.
Other
12 stars 3 forks source link

Question on emissions of development from SaaS #61

Open ArneTR opened 2 months ago

ArneTR commented 2 months ago

Hey Hey,

first of all I wanted to say thank you for the great work on the Technology Carbon Standard!

We have recently given it a spin drive internally and found it quite useful for getting a snapshot of our IT emissions.

Not sure if this is an "issue", but since you did not have the Discussion tab activated her on GitHub I thought I open an issue for now. Feel free to move it if you see it fit

Question When listing down all of our cloud solutions we use I was wondering where to put the emissions from development of these software products.

Example: Amazon Cloudfront

It so far has to be listed under Operational Emissions (Indirect) with it's emissions from electricity but also the embodied carbon. But surely Amazon has also developed this software. Where is that filled in?

We currently put that in the category Upstream Emissions - Off the shelf software and Open Source but the wording seems to exclude SaaS products atm. Is that the intention?

jcamilleri-scottlogic commented 2 months ago

Hi Arne - apologies for the delayed response.

With regards to the embodied carbon of cloud services, we include it in Category C, under Operational Emissions. From a GHG perspective, regardless of the TCS category, it falls under scope 3. If it were under Upstream Emissions (cat U), you are taking full responsibility for the embodied carbon. Our feeling is that you are only responsible for a portion of the embodied carbon whilst you are using the service. So, we currently use the CCF methodology (which includes some embodied carbon) until we can find a better alternative and account for it under Category C as an indirect, operational emission.

ArneTR commented 4 weeks ago

I feel my question was not accurate enough. Let me retry :)

When you say "embodied carbon" do you then mean the development cost, or the manufacturing cost for the hardware the services are running on?

I mean the development+testing+release etc. cost of the software in particular. for off-the-shelf software you include it in category U. But how do you handle that for cloud software?

Also: Why can I not pro-rate carbon that is in category U? Would that not happen for off-the-shelf software also? Assuming I buy Microsoft Windows. Not all the cost for "during programming, testing and releasing" which you mention in https://www.techcarbonstandard.org/impact-categories/upstream#software will be fully attributed to me. Only my share, not?

And finally: How do you estimate the cost for development+testing+release etc. for off-the-shelf and cloud software at all? So far I have not seen a single source mentioning any number on this data. Do you maybe have some references that I could read up on?