5.5 Calculate the environmental impact
Business Strategy And Product Management
Calculate the environmental impact of the project and any tooling you use, and even that of a competitor, where possible, as this may be useful for comparison.
Criteria
- Life-cycle assessment:
Conduct a life-cycle analysis/assessment (LCA) to define sustainability-related functional unit impacts throughout a project’s lifetime.- AFNOR Spec 5.1.3 (French)
- BoaviztAPI: A Bottom-Up Model to Assess the Environmental Impacts of Cloud Services (PDF)
- Building a Sustainable ICT Ecosystem (PDF)
- Consequential and Attributional Life Cycle Assessment in Streaming Media Sustainability (PDF)
- Defining Functional Units For LCA and TEA (PDF)
- Defining the functional unit
- Ecograder
- ETSI ES 203 199 (PDF)
- GPF – General Policy Framework (PDF) – 1.1 – Strategy (Assessment & Impact)
- GPF – General Policy Framework (PDF) – 1.5 – Strategy (Impact Goals)
- GPF – General Policy Framework (PDF) – 4.3 – UX and UI (Optimized Clickstream)
- GreenIT (PDF) – Appendices of the Report
- GreenIT (PDF) – Behind the Figures
- GreenIT (PDF) – Digital Technologies in Europe
- Life-cycle Assessment
- Life Cycle Assessment
- Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
- Measure the environmental impact of your products
- Principles for Designing Sustainable Services
- Scope 4 Emissions: What are Scope 4 Emissions & How to Calculate?
- The Scope 3 Blind Spot: Why Green IT Impact Often Gets Overlooked
- Track your digital footprint
- Understanding Digital life-cycle Assessments
- Understanding the Implications of Uncertainty in Embodied Carbon Models for Sustainable Computing (PDF)
- United Nations Digital Economy Report 2024
- United Nations SDGS – Goal 7 – Sustainable Energy
- United Nations SDGS – Goal 8 – Economics & Work
- United Nations SDGS – Goal 12 – Consumption & Production
- Using life cycle assessment to drive innovation for sustainable cool clouds
- Website Carbon
- Competitor impact:
Calculate the environmental impact of your project compared to that of market alternatives to inform decision-making targets. Establish the need for your product by comparing the value offered by your project compared to these same alternatives.- Apples and oranges? The challenges of comparing sustainability reporting
- Collaborating with competitors to advance sustainability (PDF)
- Competitive analysis template
- Competitor Analysis: What It Is and How to Conduct One
- EcoWeb Report 2025
- GPF – General Policy Framework (PDF) – 1.1 – Strategy (Assessment & Impact)
- GPF – General Policy Framework (PDF) – 1.5 – Strategy (Impact Goals)
- How to Prevent Overlapping and Duplication of Work
- Impacts of the mains e-commerce sites in France
- The Key Benefits of ESG Benchmarking
- United Nations SDGS – Goal 7 – Sustainable Energy
- United Nations SDGS – Goal 8 – Economics & Work
- United Nations SDGS – Goal 12 – Consumption & Production
- What Is Competitive Analysis and How to Do It Effectively
- Your Product Idea Already Exists, Now What?
- Tooling impact:
Include the impact or estimated impact of any tooling or third-party solutions used at any stage in your pipeline. While not created by you, the emissions generated in production, maintenance, and use are also integral to your overall solution.- Best Practice: Limit the number of third-party services
- GPF – General Policy Framework (PDF) – 1.1 – Strategy (Assessment & Impact)
- GPF – General Policy Framework (PDF) – 1.5 – Strategy (Impact Goals)
- Principles for Designing Sustainable Services
- Third-Party Security Risks
- Third-party services – The elephant in the room
- United Nations SDGS – Goal 7 – Sustainable Energy
- United Nations SDGS – Goal 8 – Economics & Work
- United Nations SDGS – Goal 12 – Consumption & Production
Benefits
- Accessibility
Auditing for accessibility can be included as a key part of a digital Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA), provided the key parameters are defined up front and maintained throughout the project to eliminate barriers to access. These parameters can include conformity with WCAG guidance, including manual checks. - Economic
Using a functional unit approach supports a robust product or service while avoiding unnecessary and potentially costly features. - Environment
Conducting a rigorous LCA can reveal significant opportunities to reduce overall environmental impact through the identification and elimination of factors and vectors of digital emissions such as water and e-waste. - Performance
Including a detailed overview of optimizations in your LCA provides a clear direction to improve sustainability and performance. - Social Equity
Including intersectional social metrics in your LCA can provide an opportunity to simultaneously consider and work on issues such as inequality, which also affect sustainability.
GRI
- Materials: Medium
- Energy: Medium
- Water: Medium
- Emissions: Medium