Accounting for digital infrastructure GHG emissions

A host of regulations worldwide have introduced (or will introduce) legal mandates forcing data center operators to report specific operational data and metrics. Key examples include the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD); the European Commission’s proposed Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) recast; the draft US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) climate disclosure proposal and various national reporting requirements (including in Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, and the UK) under the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). The industry is not, currently, adequately prepared to address these requirements, however.

Current data-exchange practices lack consistency — and any recognized consensus — on reporting sustainability-related data, such as energy and water use, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and operational metrics. Many enterprises have, throughout discussions with Uptime Institute, indicated that it is difficult (and sometimes impossible) to obtain energy and emissions data from colocation and cloud operators.