Did you know that digital technologies now account for 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions? That’s more than the aviation industry!
Paul Peet, our business design director talked with Acquia, our Digital Experience Platform (DXP) partner, on how we help organisations like the Climate Group and Blue Cross for Pets reduce their digital carbon footprint.
a digital strategy for a greener future
It can be challenging to quantify digital carbon emissions within an organisation, particularly when it comes to Scope 2 and 3 tracking. manifesto works with clients to audit their websites and platforms, providing clear actions to significantly reduce their carbon emissions.
Is this part of your digital strategy or net-zero plans? Find out more below or book a chat with our team.
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How big is your organisation’s digital carbon footprint?
To give you a scale of the problem, here are some key takeaways we’ve uncovered:
Cooking on gas
We audited a company website that had greenhouse emissions equivalent to a 4-bedroom house. Through our recommendations, this can be reduced to the equivalent of a 1-bedroom flat. By streamlining content delivery, optimising images, reconfiguring integrations and server architecture, we can reduce emissions by 75%, whilst improving site speed, performance, user experience and SEO.
The Bot Epidemic
50% of website traffic is now attributable to automated ‘bad bots’. Having bot protection on your site reduces unnecessary emissions whilst also protecting you and your visitors from malware and improving your SEO.
Thirsty AI
A typical conversation with ChatGPT uses 500ml of water to cool its servers and generate electricity. One study estimates that AI could account for up to 6.6bn cubic metres of water use by 2027 - nearly half of the UK’s annual consumption. Businesses should consider ethical implications of how they utilise AI tools, balancing the benefits with the environmental costs.
Data overload
Data centre workloads have risen by over 340% since the Paris agreement in 2015, making them one of the fastest-growing sources of emissions. Organisations and teams need to consider efficient data management practices. Techniques such as data consolidation, deduplication and deletion, along with cloud optimisation and data storage tiering can reduce the volume of data stored and processed by up to 50% whilst also significantly reducing annual costs for your business.
Introducing the manifesto digital sustainability audit
We’ve developed an audit framework aligned with standards set by Green Software Foundation and Boavizta.
We measure, report and reduce through:
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Energy Efficiency - Mapping electricity consumed by your software, providing actions to significantly reduce consumption when performing its functions.
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Hardware Efficiency - Identifying actions to make software need fewer physical resources when performing its functions.
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Business Processes - Building carbon awareness to help teams understand carbon emissions across key activities and workflows. Specifically working with Digital & Marketing teams to significantly reduce carbon emissions caused by activities such as social media campaigns, content creation workflows or the use of Generative-AI Large Language Models.
The final output will give you a detailed report on:
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Carbon analysis and reporting - an estimated total environmental impact, measured by industry standard Global warming potential (GWP).
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Impact ratings - a detailed rating system, prioritising actions based on their Global Warming Potential Reduction.
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Detailed Actions - a prioritised list of impact ratings, recommendations and actions to significantly reduce carbon emissions. We’ll roadmap these actions on “now, soon and future” timeframes, as well detailing what you can do within your organisation vs where you’ll need support from external providers.