Digital decarbonization: tools worth knowing
A field guide to measuring and reducing the footprint of software, websites and AI: open standards, calculators, data sources and where each fits.
By Writam Bugga · · 2 min read
Over a year of reading and building, I collected a working shortlist of tools for digital decarbonization. None of them is complete. Together they cover most of what a product team needs to start.
Measure
- SCI specification: the standard for carbon per functional unit.
- Cloud Carbon Footprint: open source estimates from cloud billing data.
- CodeCarbon: tracks emissions of Python and ML workloads.
- Website Carbon Calculator: a quick estimate for a single page.
- Boavizta: open data and APIs on hardware's embodied impact.
Reduce
- Carbon Aware SDK: shift workloads in time and place.
- Electricity Maps: live grid carbon intensity.
- Sustainable Web Design: guidelines for lighter pages.
Account
- Climatiq: emission factors through an API.
- GHG Protocol: where digital emissions land in Scope 2 and 3.
- openLCA: when a digital product needs a full LCA.
Principles I keep coming back to
- Ship less: smaller pages, compressed images, fewer scripts.
- Compute less: cache, batch, choose the right model size.
- Compute cleaner: choose regions and times with lower grid intensity.
- Keep hardware longer.
The full list lives on the resources page.
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