This principle in the sustainability pillar of the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework provides an overview of industry guidelines and frameworks with which you should align your sustainability efforts.
Principle overview
To ensure that your sustainability initiatives are built upon a foundation of globally recognized methods for measurement, reporting, and verification, we recommend that you align your initiatives with the following industry guidelines:
When you align your sustainability initiatives with these shared external guidelines, your initiatives get the credibility and auditability that investors, regulatory bodies, and other external stakeholders demand. You also foster accountability across engineering teams, embed sustainability within employee training, and successfully integrate cloud operations into enterprise-wide commitments for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting.
W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines
W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) is an emerging framework of best practices developed by a W3C working group to address the environmental impact of digital products and services. The guidelines cover the entire lifecycle of a digital solution including business and product strategy, user experience (UX) design, web development, hosting, infrastructure, and systems. The core goal of WSG is to enable developers and architects to build websites and web applications that are more energy-efficient and that reduce network traffic, client-side processing, and server-side resource consumption. These guidelines serve a critical reference point for aligning application-level sustainability with cloud-level architectural decisions.
Green Software Foundation
The Green Software Foundation (GSF) focuses on building an industry ecosystem around sustainable software. Its mission is to drive the creation of software that's designed, built, and operated to minimize the carbon footprint. The GSF developed the Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specification, which provides a common standard for measuring the rate of carbon emissions of any piece of software. Alignment with the GSF helps developers connect an application's efficiency directly to the carbon impact of the cloud environment.
Greenhouse Gas Protocol
The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol is a widely used set of standards for measuring, managing, and publicly reporting greenhouse gas emissions. The protocol was developed through a partnership between the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). The GHG protocol provides the essential framework for corporate climate accounting. The Carbon Footprint report provides data for emission scopes that are relevant to cloud usage. For more information, see Carbon Footprint reporting methodology.
Adherence to the GHG Protocol helps to ensure that your sustainability initiatives have credibility and that external parties can audit your carbon emissions data. You also help prevent the perception of greenwashing and satisfy the due-diligence requirements of your investors, regulators, and external stakeholders. Verified and audited data helps your organization prove accountability and build trust in public-facing sustainability commitments.