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The Greening Government Commitments require government to reduce the carbon (CO2) emissions and waste caused by its information technology.

Work towards making your service environmentally sustainable. Even small improvements can help reduce biodiversity loss, global warming and harm to people’s health and wellbeing.

To understand and reduce your service’s environmental impact:

• measure your service’s emissions and other environmental impacts throughout its lifecycle, and report them to your department
• make a plan for how you’ll reduce your service’s environmental impact, in line with your department’s goals

Understanding the impact of your service, suppliers and users

You should look to understand the environmental impact of every part of your service, including its operations. For example:

• mining resources and manufacturing
• transport and maintenance
• generating power for and disposing of hardware - including servers, routers and optical fibres
• generating power for software - including storing and moving data

It also includes the impact of your suppliers’ and users’ activities across all channels, for example:

• downloading files and software
• buying new hardware
• travel, transport and postal services
• lighting and heating buildings
• using physical materials, like paper

You can read the National Grid’s guide to . Use the to help you identify and reduce emissions.

Software, hardware and power

Design your software so that it uses as little power and water from server cooling systems as possible. For example, you can:

• use caching and to reduce the energy used by servers
• use energy efficient software, hardware and infrastructure
• reuse or recycle hardware, and use it for as long as possible
• dispose of hardware responsibly
• use renewable energy to power data centres and computing resources
• minimise your use of high-energy content, like video and artificial intelligence (AI)

Data use

to minimise its impact.

Compress and aggregate your data to use less storage and bandwidth.

Check the data you hold regularly and delete what you do not need to save space.

Choosing third party suppliers

When you invite suppliers to bid for projects, make sure they:

• explain the environmental impact of their proposal
• show how they’ll reduce and minimise the environmental impact

Use this information when choosing your suppliers. For example, you could:

• give more weight to suppliers whose proposals have the most sustainable environmental impact
• work with chosen suppliers to reduce their proposal’s environmental impact

Read more about third party suppliers and sustainability in the Greening Government Commitments.