From the course: Including Sustainability in Your Cloud Strategy

Understanding types of emissions

From the course: Including Sustainability in Your Cloud Strategy

Understanding types of emissions

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- [Presenter] It is difficult to know where to begin tracking your businesses' emissions without knowing what is the direct or indirect consumption of your business. There's a regulatory framework to divide your carbon emissions into three main categories. Scope one are all direct emissions. This means all direct emissions from the activities of your organization or under its control, including fuel consumption on site like gas boilers, fleet vehicles, and air conditioning leaks. Scope two are indirect emissions. What emissions are occurring from utilities purchased and used by the organization? Emissions are created during the production of the energy and eventually used by the organization. Scope three are all other indirect emissions. These are emissions from activities of the organization occurring from sources that they do not own nor control. These are usually the greatest share of the carbon footprint covering emissions from business travel, procurement waste, and water to name a few. Scope one and two are easier to manage for an organization. Scope three emissions will sometimes make up to 80 to 90% often organization total emission can be a challenge to accurately predict and report. It requires closed data collaboration between your partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders in the business. Please keep in mind that under current regulations, all the carbon emissions from your own premises data center is considered scope one. While if you move all the workload to the public cloud, it'll be considered scope three from a carbon reporting perspective. In this section, we talked about different types of emissions and how most of the emissions for an organization fall under scope three, including emission generated from cloud computing. Next, we will dive a little deeper into how the carbon consumption of a computer changes with its weight utilization.

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