First, we must understand three simple principles:
Posted: Sat Feb 22, 2025 6:19 am
As a result, it is estimated that the internet could grow to account for 3.5% of global carbon emissions within the next 10 years, at a time when we rapidly need to be reducing emissions from all industries.
The urgency has been highlighted by Thomas Stocker, one of the world’s leading climate scientists and former co-chair of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has stated:
The year 2020 is crucial. If CO2 emissions continue to rise beyond that date, the most ambitious mitigation goals will become unachievable. (Source: M2020)
This leaves us just two years to transform our industry from being one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions and start to bring our collective emissions down. As web designers, developers or belize phone number data the owners of websites, we must be looking to see what we can do to reduce the emissions from our own websites.
We cannot manage things that we cannot measure.
Data transfer consumes electricity, so reducing data transfer will reduce energy and emissions.
Renewable energy produces far fewer emissions than other sources.
Measuring Carbon Emissions From Websites
It is very difficult to improve anything that you cannot measure and until recently it was almost impossible to know what the emissions from a particular website might be. The result was that is was hard for web designers, developers and website owners to even discuss the issue of their websites carbon emissions, let alone do anything about it.
Luckily this is now possible using the free tool for estimating website CO2 emissions at WebsiteCarbon.com that provides data on the CO2 emissions per page view, the annual CO2 emissions (based on a specified amount of page views), the annual energy consumption and whether or not the website is hosted in a data centre powered by renewable energy. Using this tool it is possible to benchmark your own website against competitors and set targets for your own carbon reduction.
The urgency has been highlighted by Thomas Stocker, one of the world’s leading climate scientists and former co-chair of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has stated:
The year 2020 is crucial. If CO2 emissions continue to rise beyond that date, the most ambitious mitigation goals will become unachievable. (Source: M2020)
This leaves us just two years to transform our industry from being one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions and start to bring our collective emissions down. As web designers, developers or belize phone number data the owners of websites, we must be looking to see what we can do to reduce the emissions from our own websites.
We cannot manage things that we cannot measure.
Data transfer consumes electricity, so reducing data transfer will reduce energy and emissions.
Renewable energy produces far fewer emissions than other sources.
Measuring Carbon Emissions From Websites
It is very difficult to improve anything that you cannot measure and until recently it was almost impossible to know what the emissions from a particular website might be. The result was that is was hard for web designers, developers and website owners to even discuss the issue of their websites carbon emissions, let alone do anything about it.
Luckily this is now possible using the free tool for estimating website CO2 emissions at WebsiteCarbon.com that provides data on the CO2 emissions per page view, the annual CO2 emissions (based on a specified amount of page views), the annual energy consumption and whether or not the website is hosted in a data centre powered by renewable energy. Using this tool it is possible to benchmark your own website against competitors and set targets for your own carbon reduction.