Counting Carbon – Transparency, Accounting and Embodied Carbon

This presentation covers the carbon legislation in the UK, EU and US, the reporting mechanisms, and the scale of the task ahead, some insights into the carbon emissions of the cloud and colocation companies, and the transparency of reporting, some recent information from the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres (Energy Efficiency) and the mapping of the ISO30134 metrics to the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, and finally the future cost of carbon and what this will mean to the sector.

Sustainability has become a must-have customer requirement in the data center industry. Historically, data center operators and providers have looked narrowly at sustainability from an operational perspective, focusing on elements such as green power and water utilization. In this presentation, Nancy Novak, Compass Datacenters’ Chief Innovation Officer explains how sustainability precedes the installation of the very first server. Novak will explain how the incorporation of new construction methodologies and materials are integral to reducing the associated carbon footprint while building data centers.

Reducing embodied carbon emissions is one of the most urgent opportunities we have today in reducing the footprint of our built spaces as building materials manufacturing makes up 11% of total GHG emissions annually.The Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) is a free and easy to use tool that allows owners, green building certification programs and policymakers to assess supply chain data in order to create EPD requirements, and set embodied carbon limits and reductions, at the construction material and project scale. Stacy Smedley, Executive Director of Building Transparency, will explain the urgent need to reduce the embodied carbon emissions of our building materials and products, the breakthrough represented by this open source tool, and how EC3 supports low-carbon material procurement.

According to Lars Schedin, calculations show that up to 90 % of carbon emissions are Scope 3. Governments acknowledge the difficulties in accurately measuring these and examining the current accounting standard of the Green House Gas Protocol highlights the complexity companies face when accounting for these types of value chain emissions. This presentation examines how practical methodologies that accurately and transparently measure Data Center facilities can lower its Scope 3 emissions and significantly reduce its carbon footprint