Measuring IT Carbon Footprint: What is the Current Status Actually?

Despite the new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive from the European Union, which presses large enterprises to be more transparent about their GHG emissions, and though large technology- or advisory firms might peddle otherwise, there are plenty of challenges ahead when it comes to measuring GHG emissions from IT activities in the first place. This paper categories those challenges into 4 categories, and explains the current status, shortcomings and potential future research directions. These categories are: measuring software energy consumption, server overhead energy consumption, Energy Mix and emissions from embodied carbon. Next to that, various non-profit and open-source initiatives are introduced as well as a mathematical framework, based on CPU consumption, that can act as a rule-of-thumb for quick and effortless assessments.