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Hiding greenhouse gas emissions in the cloud

Nature Climate Change volume 10, page 701 (2020)Cite this article

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The majority of this growth is attributed to cloud computing, particularly by the largest ‘hyperscale’ vendors such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The market size for cloud computing has grown from $6 billion in 2008 to $288 billion in 2019 (ref. 3), with the majority of future growth in information technology (IT) workloads across all types of data centres expected to be in the cloud4.

If outsourced to the cloud, IT emissions previously accounted for under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol5 Scope 1 — emissions that are directly linked to the activities of an organization from sources that it owns and control — and Scope 2 — emissions from the generation of purchased energy — move to Scope 3, referring to all other emissions. When an organization purchases its own equipment and signs contracts for electricity from a co-location facility, all their IT emissions fall under Scope 1 or Scope 2 (ref. 6). If the IT workload is moved to the cloud, the organization is no longer directly generating emissions under Scope 1 and is not purchasing energy under Scope 2. Therefore, all those emissions move to Scope 3.

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References

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  1. Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, London, UK

    David Mytton

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Mytton, D. Hiding greenhouse gas emissions in the cloud. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 701 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0837-6

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