Carbon footprint calculator for large scale digital investments (country or city scale).
The calculator Excel file is distributed by the Agence Francaise de Developpement (AFD) under the CC-BY-SA 2.0 licence (see inside the Excel file).
This calculator is designed for investment officers at public development bank such as AFD. These officers need to estimate how positively or negatively a digital investment project (e.g. investing of a new telecommunications infrastructure) will impact the emissions of green-house gases of a given territory or organization.
One of the main lesson learned while designing this calculator is that there is no "green" Information Technology per se. Any new infrastructure will emit additional CO2. But IT can be much less emissive than other technologies. The more highly-carbon-intensive technologies are decommissioned and replaced by digital technologies, the better for the CO2 trajectory. Hence IT investments can sometimes reduce the emissions of green-house gases by reducing the use of "browner" technical solutions.
For instance, digital can be less emissive than concrete buildings or intensive agriculture. Well designed IT investments in urban and peri-urban areas can reduce the need and use of buildings (think of remote work and flex office vs. office buildings). They can also accelerate the adoption of less emissive agricultural practices in rural areas (think of online training and support networks for farmers being trained at agro-ecology).
"Purer" digital projects can also be beneficial when existing fleets of power-hungry desktops (and inhouse computer rooms) are massively replaced by long-lasting energy-efficients laptops (and energy-efficient data centers).
This calculator allows such projects to be quantified in terms of total carbon footprint.