How and where to start?
To minimize or reduce their impact on the climate, organizations should reduce their carbon emissions. First, they need to measure their current carbon footprint. Once that is understood, this information can be communicated to key stakeholders and used to plan how to reduce it through positive changes.
Calculating the carbon footprint is just one kind of environmental impact assessment, but it is especially relevant to digital archives. This is because greenhouse gas emissions from energy consumption and hardware production are likely to be far more significant than air/water pollution, radiation emissions or waste. Assess and include these additional impacts if they are a concern, but we recommend calculating the carbon footprint as a good way to start, since the amount of greenhouse gases that go into the atmosphere is a reasonable proxy for the scale of your global environmental impact.
Work through the steps below to get started with this exercise:
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Plan your project – before doing anything, it is important to understand what you are actually trying to accomplish – that will impact your approach and the decisions you make.
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Create a service map – whichever goals you are trying to achieve with your carbon footprint calculations, it is helpful to understand your organizational boundaries and the scope of your carbon calculations. Creating a service map will help you to do this.