Environmentally sustainable services
Source: gov.uk (2025-02-24)

Reducing the environmental impact of services.

The Greening Government Commitments require government to reduce the CO2 emissions and waste caused by its information technology (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/greening-government-ict-annual-report-2023-to-2024/greening-government-commitments-ict-annual-report-2023-to-2024#:~:text=2022%20and%202023.-,Detail%20of%20government%20ICT%20emissions%20footprint,compared%20to%202022%20and%202023.).

You should work to reduce your service’s impact to an environmentally sustainable level. This is important to avoid contributing unnecessarily to harmful biodiversity loss, global heating and negative impacts on people’s health and wellbeing.

To help understand, reduce and mitigate the environmental impact of your services, you should:
- measure your service’s emissions and other environmental impacts throughout its lifecycle, and report them to your department
- have a plan for reducing environmental impacts that is in line with departmental goals
You should seek to understand the environmental impacts of all aspects of your service, including:
- mining resources, manufacturing, maintenance, transportation, generating power for and disposing of hardware (including servers, routers and optical fibres)
- generating power for software (including storing and moving data)
- activities of all providers and users, across all channels (for example downloading files and software, buying new hardware, travel and transport, postal services, lighting and heating, and physical materials like paper)
The National Grid explains more about different scopes of emissions (https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/what-are-scope-1-2-3-carbon-emissions). The Technology Carbon Standard (https://www.techcarbonstandard.org/) can help you identify and reduce emissions.

Software, hardware and power

You should design software to require minimal processing power and water consumption (from server cooling systems). You might do this by:
- reducing servers’ energy use by caching and using content delivery networks (https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/what-is-a-cdn/)
- using energy efficient software, hardware and infrastructure
- reusing, recycling, or maximising the lifespan of and/or disposing of hardware effectively
- using renewable energy sources for powering data centres and computing resources
- minimising the use of high-energy content, such as video and AI
Data use

Minimise the impacts from data storage and transmission by using efficient data handling practices (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-practices-data-management-tips-tricks-efficient-1c).

Use data compression and aggregation to reduce storage and bandwidth requirements.

Regularly review and retire the data you hold to help reduce its volume and impact.

Third party suppliers

When inviting third party suppliers to bid for projects, you should require them to:
- explain their proposal’s environmental impact
- show how they will reduce and minimise the environmental impact
You should use this information when choosing suppliers. This could be by weighting selections towards suppliers whose proposals have the most sustainable environmental impact, or by working with chosen suppliers to reduce their proposal’s environmental impact.

You can read more about sustainability and third party suppliers in the Greening Government Commitments (https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/greening-government-commitments).