Quantifying Emissions

The Drupal Association is currently not set up to do carbon accounting for Drupal.org and associated sites. Drupal.org is an unusually large and complex site, as it is where much of the development of Drupal takes place. This guide the following is some guidance for the hundreds of thousands of sites which use Drupal and may need to start doing carbon accounting. 

For the web, sustainability inherently involves both the server, client, and all the computers in between. There has been a lot of work done on looking at evaluating the environmental impact of data centers, and the sites within it. 

Some servers offer tools like Platform.sh that allow you to see a report of the CO2 for your server. AWS has a Customer Carbon Footprint Tool as do Google and Azure. The Green Software Foundation is a good place to look for more server-side tools. 

To understand the CO2 of the front-end of your own website, we recommend looking at an open source tool like Sitespeed.io which incorporates the results from CO2.js.  There is still a lot of debate about best practices around your site, but if you are able to reduce the processing time to render your site, this generally lowers CO2. So even using a tool like Unlighthouse.dev to get a sense of where you can improve is good. 

There are great proprietary tools like WebsiteCarbon.com and Ecograder. Each tool may use their own unique approach to calculate CO2 and provide guidance about how to reduce your environmental footprint. With any of these tools what matters is that you use them to reduce your CO2 emissions. There will always be advantages/disadvantages to different models.