Carbon Footprint Calculations for a Software Company – Adapting GHG Protocol Scopes 1, 2 and 3 to the Software Industry

Status:: 🟩
Links:: Accounting of GHG Emissions from Digital Services & Companies

Metadata

Authors:: Sipilä, Antti; Partanen, Laura; Porras, Jari
Authors:: Hyrynsalmi, Sami; Münch, Jürgen; Smolander, Kari; Melegati, Jorge
Title:: Carbon Footprint Calculations for a Software Company – Adapting GHG Protocol Scopes 1, 2 and 3 to the Software Industry
Date:: 2024
Publisher:: Springer Nature Switzerland
URL::
DOI:: 10.1007/978-3-031-53227-6_31

Notes & Annotations

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📑 Annotations (imported on 2024-03-17#07:17:44)

sipila.etal.2024.carbonfootprintcalculations (pg. 5)

Adopting the GHG Protocol for specific industries requires identifying the relevant business operations and their effects. Software companies are a special case in this regard, as their products are digital instead of physical. On the other hand, these products are dependent on physical hardware infrastructure, which means they require electricity and thus produce emissions [9]. In addition, modern software uses a client-server model, which runs on a server in a data center environment or a cloud service. This affects the emissions and makes the emissions calculation fuzzy.

sipila.etal.2024.carbonfootprintcalculations (pg. 10)

The first step, design, is the phase where most of the critical decisions concerning the emissions are made [13]. These include architecture choices [17, 18], programming language [19–21], integrated development environment, graphical choices [22], etc. These choices influence both the coding and testing phase and the usage and maintenance phase. As such, it seems to influence many of the scope three emissions in both the downstream and upstream.

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  3. Venters, C.C., et al.: Software sustainability: research and practice from a software architecture viewpoint. J. Syst. Softw. 138, 174–188 (2018)
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  5. Zwinkau, A.: Resource awareness for efficiency in high-level programming languages, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Technical report, Karlsruhe, Nr. 12 (2012)
  6. Pereira, R., et al.: Energy efficiency across programming languages: how do energy, time, and memory relate? In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering, pp. 256–267 (2017)
  7. Salonen, L.: finding Ecologically Sustainable Design Principles for Mobile Devices Towards a Heuristic Model from a List of Good Design Practices (2021)
sipila.etal.2024.carbonfootprintcalculations (pg. 10)

The coding and testing phase is the source of Scope One and Two emissions, as it is the main business activity of the company. It is where they use their equipment and offices, and it causes a lot of its direct use of energy. It also includes some Scope Three emissions from the upstream, such as employee commuting.

sipila.etal.2024.carbonfootprintcalculations (pg. 10)

The usage and maintenance phase is composed mostly of Scope Three emissions from downstream, such as distribution and tech support.

sipila.etal.2024.carbonfootprintcalculations (image) (pg. 11)

Factors for a software company to include in Scopes 1, 2, and 3.

sipila.etal.2024.carbonfootprintcalculations (image) (pg. 12)

The Software Company Scopes model presents an overview of scopes and emissions across the value chain of a software company with visualization adopted from the GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain Accounting Reporting standard [8].