Measuring cloud emissions
Cloud providers publish the emissions tied to your consumption: Azure Emissions Impact Dashboard, AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, Google Cloud Carbon Footprint. We match this data with billing, by application and business unit, in the same dashboard as costs. Your sustainability and IT teams look at the same numbers.
Two caveats: this data is published with a one- to two-month delay, and calculation methods vary by provider. We always state the source and date of the figures shown.
Where the cloud's footprint comes from
- Scope 3 (the vast majority): metal extraction, server manufacturing, transport and end of life of the hardware.
- Scopes 1 and 2 (marginal for a customer): backup generators, cooling fluids and datacenter electricity, largely covered by renewable energy purchases.
In the data published by providers, scope 3 often accounts for more than 95% of a customer's emissions. Watch out for methodology changes: when a provider changes how it accounts for renewable electricity, scope 2 can jump from one month to the next with no change in consumption. We flag it, so nobody reads an increase that doesn't exist.
To track progress over time, we relate emissions to activity: kg CO₂e per VM per month, for example. The indicator goes down when the estate grows but each VM is better used.
The takeaway: the best GreenOps lever is sobriety. Fewer VMs running, less data retained and right-sized resources mean less hardware to manufacture.
The levers that really reduce the footprint
| Lever | Savings (€) | Real CO₂ |
|---|---|---|
| Cleaning unused resources | Yes | Yes |
| Stop/Start for non-prod and VDI | Yes | Yes |
| Rightsizing | Yes | Yes |
| Data retention policy (logs, backups) | Yes | Yes |
| Reserved Instances / savings plans | Yes | No |
The reservation trap
A reservation cuts the bill sharply, but changes nothing in physical consumption. Yet some cloud provider dashboards show lower emissions when costs go down. So we separate financial savings from real footprint reductions, for honest carbon reporting. See also our Reserved Instances and savings plans page.
Numbers everyone understands
A hundred tonnes of CO₂ a year is roughly 50 Paris–New York round trips by plane, or more than 10 times around the Earth by car. A telling number does more for team awareness than ten tables.
Data ready for your sustainability reporting
Cloud emissions are formatted, with their history and source, to feed your carbon accounting, your non-financial reporting and your discussions with the sustainability team.