Honest review from independent experts in digital sustainability. Clear guidance on what to do next.
If you’re in a sustainability role, Green Web Foundation can help you answer questions relevant to your reporting and strategy for managing the environmental impact of your digital services.
We help you answer these questions in ways your technical teams can understand and act upon, so it’s not just seen as a one-way box-ticking exercise, but a target they can actively work with you on reaching.
And we help you do it with the same data you would use when disclosing against voluntary schemes like the v2 corporate standards from the Science Based Targets Institute, for your B-Corp Certification, or for transparency laws that may apply to you, like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive in Europe.
Every client has slightly different needs, but usually, working with us looks like one or more of the engagements outlined below:
Audit my numbers
“What am I missing in my reporting? How good are the estimates that I do have for digital?“
Calculating the environmental impacts from digital services inside your organisation is a fairly new practice, and increasingly needs to stand up to external scrutiny from regulators and other stakeholders.
If you already have some calculated numbers for the environmental impact of digital, we can help you use our open framework, DIST, to understand where there might be gaps, catch easy-to-make mistakes, and generally you feel more confident about about the numbers you do disclose.
You get a friendly, confidential review, advance notice of where you may be challenged ahead of time, and steps you can take to refine the figures before disclosure.
Audit my methods
“How should I be estimating the footprint of this new use of digital in my organisation?“
In addition to working out the footprint of well established digital services, there are new forms of activity to account for as well, like if you’re rolling out AI across your organisation.
If there’s new activity you haven’t measured before, we can help with a confidential review of your methodology, and with advice on how to use it in your reporting, or external communications.
You get independent, external review, and a clear idea of how this fits into your existing efforts to quantify environmental impacts. If you need one for an auditor, we can provide a letter of expert opinion to share with them.
Audit my progress
“We have a clean energy target. How far along are we when we include our digital services?“
If you have clean energy targets and you make significant use of digital services in your organisation it can be hard to track progress through your supply chain.
We can help you understand your progress with the data we have been collecting in our platform, since the early 2010’s.
Where we do not have the data you need, we work with you to send along a request for the right information.
You get a clear idea of how far along you are now to your target, how changes in reporting standards in the coming years may change this, and what steps you can take to maintain progress towards your goal.
Who is this for ?
This offering is best for organisations who have dedicated sustainability staff and where the organisation either has existing public decarbonisation commitments or is actively working towards making them.
When we say dedicated sustainability staff, we mean someone whose primary role has a sustainability management or reporting responsibilities, either across the entire organisation, or where they are responsible for a specific type of activity relating to digital. See the FAQ below to see more examples of the kind of public commitments we’re referring to.
If your organisation is earlier than this in its digital sustainability journey, our briefings and training services may be a better fit. See our services page for more.
What are the benefits of working with the Green Web Foundation?
Whether you are working on your first disclosures, or seeking a second opinion on what you have already, working with the Green Web Foundation has a few clear benefits.
Reduce your risks around disclosure – the stakes are growing when it comes to corporate reporting and disclosure. In addition to the reputational risks from poorly evidenced claims, new laws coming into effect have teeth, with stiff financial penalties for absent, misleading, or inaccurate disclosure. Work with us to get an early overview of these risks so you can act in good time.
Save you time and money – digital sustainability as a field is relatively new, is poorly understood, is fast moving, and in many cases vendor transparency has a long way to go. We’ve spent years going through the approaches offered by different vendors, how to account for their differences. Working with us helps fast forward past this otherwise time consuming, and often expensive process, to get to numbers you can use, and trust.
Make it easier to trust your message – we are an independent non-profit, and careful who we work with. When you work with us, you’ll get candid advice on what is safer to say if you want to preserve trust with stakeholders, and what you’ll likely get pushback on, ahead of publication.
Aligned incentives around public disclosure: Our key driver is data-informed public discourse around digital sustainability, which requires trustworthy disclosure by actors in the industry. We are not interested in any land and expand strategies to sell as many billable hours as possible, nor in locking you into using proprietary services and software. Our goal is to help you get your disclosure to a level that is easy to trust and act on before moving on – if you need longer term partners we are happy to refer you to specialists, or vendors we know and trust.
Who would I be working with?
Our staff are recognised in the field of digital sustainability. We are invited experts in standards groups like the World Wide Web Consortium, the Green Software Foundation, the Internet Research Task Force, and the UK Government Digital Sustainability Alliance. This means you are working with the people who have unique insight into the standards used to both measure and report on the impacts of digital, and with a foundation whose data and code are used in many software solutions for doing so.
Chris Adams
Hannah Smith
Fershad Irani
Katrin Fritsch
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Frequently asked questions
Yes, we do bespoke work as well. We are well positioned to help with the kinds of questions above, but we have done other work too, like providing strategic advice for governments, technical reviews of procurement guides, and reports, and more. See our case studies for more, and for the fastest response, use our contact form.
No, but ideally you need someone involved who is responsible for collecting the information needed for your sustainability reporting, or at least focussing on the impacts of digital if they are in a larger organisation. They will need to know what a greenhouse gas inventory is, and either have access to the data needed for estimating impacts from digital, or know who to speak to get it.
It can help, but it’s not necessary. When we say one or more public decarbonisation commitments, we mean things like your organisation:
– Has a current B-Corp Certification, or is going through the process to achieve it.
– Has made a Net Zero SME Hub Climate Commitment.
– Has a validated target with the Science Based Targets Institute.
– Is in the scope of the European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), so is expected to report on cloud and datacentre emissions as part of the European Sustainability Reporting standards (ESRS).
You do not need a full greenhouse gas inventory across your whole organisation, but you will need at least some emissions data collected from your suppliers, or in-house departments operating digital infrastructure.
No – while this service is available to organisations that offer hosted digital services, and who might appear in our directory, but most of the time we work with customers of hosting providers, who have publicly committed to reaching specific sustainability goals by a given year, and want help understanding their progress as 2030 approaches.
It works best for organisations with dedicated sustainability staff, and where there is evidence of organisational buy-in.
No – we do not act as an auditor for B-Corp, or B-Lab, and we do not have any relationship with them. We specialise in helping people understand and manage the environmental impact of digital services, so we can help you with making sure that part of your annual emissions inventory has been carried out competently, but the rest would be your responsibility.
No, although most of the time organisations come with asking for guidance how to think about impacts across their whole organisation. If you have a new project, and you want an understanding of it’s likely environmental impact, we can help you here. However it would need to be a large enough project justify the costs of an audit, relative to the cost of the total project.