Geospatial

In the first post of a series dedicated to the measurement of data center environmental footprints we reviewed the conceptual thought frameworks and challenges. The main objective in this second post is to outline current measurement methodologies and document their quantitative prescriptions in mathematical form.

Concern about the environmental footprint of data center infrastructure is relatively new.¹ In the early stages of the sustainability movement the volume of digital infrastructure deployed in data centers was dwarfed by the environmental impact of other industrial sectors (e.g., transport, manufacturing, agriculture etc.). Hence even as milestones such as the Paris Agreement (2015) accelerated worldwide efforts towards a sustainable economy, the Information and Communication Industry (ICT) sector received comparatively little attention.

What is the EU Datathon?

The EU Datathon is an annual Open Data competition organised by the Publications Office of the European Union since 2017. The competitions are organised to create new value for citizens through innovation and promoting the use of open data, in particular the datasets available on the official portal for European data.

Equinox 0.4 Release

Equinox is an open source platform that supports holistic risk management and reporting in the context of Sustainable Portfolio Management. The platform integrates geospatial information with applicable regulatory and industry standards, for example the GHG Protocol (accounting for Project based, Corporate and City-Wide greenhouse gas emissions), the IPCC Emissions Factor database and further reference data, the PCAF attribution methodologies (and more) to provide a holistic view of the footprint of both individual projects and portfolios.

Equinox is an open source platform that supports the holistic risk management and reporting of major sustainable finance projects (the financing of projects with material physical footprint) such as project finance.

Equinox aims to integrate in the database a number reference databases that facilitate tasks of sustainable portfolio management. In the current focus such reference material concerns the emissions factors for various processes and activities. In the latest (Solstice Day!) update of the Equinox Project we discuss the integration of reference data an in particular greenhouse gas emissions factors as catalogued in the IPCC Emissions Factors database (EFDB).

The frontpage graphic is adapted from Steffen et al. “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet”. Science (2015). The Planetary Boundaries concept was proposed in 2009 by this group of Earth system and environmental scientists. The group suggested that finding a “safe operating space for humanity” is a precondition for sustainable development. The framework is based on scientific evidence that human actions since the Industrial Revolution have become the main driver of global environmental change.

Motivation

Equinox is an open source platform that supports holistic risk management and reporting of Sustainable Finance (Sustainable Portfolio Management). The platform integrates geospatial information with applicable regulatory and industry standards from EBA, PCAF and Equator Principles to provide a holistic view of the footprint of both individual projects and portfolios, in particular of project finance investments.

Course Content

This course is a CrashProgram (short course) introducing the GeoJSON specification for the encoding of geospatial features. The course is at an introductory technical level. It requires some familiarity with data specifications such as JSON and a very basic knowledge of Python