The Carbon Footprint Toolkit has been developed to support organizations undertaking digital preservation to understand, measure, and reduce the carbon footprint of their activities in a practical and proportionate way. It responds to growing interest within the digital preservation community for clear, actionable guidance that can be applied across a wide range of organizational contexts, technical infrastructures, and levels of experience with environmental reporting.
This toolkit has been created by the DPC’s Carbon Footprint Task Force and was released in March 2026 for community comment and testing.
We will be using this pre-release period to test the toolkit with a small support group and develop a set of case studies to be published alongside the full version of the toolkit in September 2026.
The toolkit consists of a guide (currently available as a Google doc) and an Excel spreadsheet tool:
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Carbon Footprint Toolkit – The toolkit text is currently available as a Google doc for ease of commenting/editing/updating.
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Carbon Footprint calculation tool – The Excel spreadsheet tool can be downloaded and used to enter relevant data and calculate carbon footprint.
If you have any feedback on the draft toolkit please comment on the Google document or use this feedback form
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Suggested citation of current version |
Digital Preservation Coalition (2026). Carbon Footprint Toolkit. Draft for comment |
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Last updated |
March 2026 |
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Date of next planned review |
Ongoing review during testing period (full release planned September 2026) |
This is a draft release of the Carbon Footprint Toolkit (released March 2026). This toolkit was created by the Carbon Footprint Task Force, chaired by Alicia Wise. Thank you to all of those who were involved! Read more and find out about how the toolkit was created here.