As part of their wider sustainability strategy, Surrey Heath Borough Council were looking to understand, communicate and reduce the carbon footprint of their IT infrastructure.
The Council’s sustainability and Economic Development Strategies dovetail on the topics of digital technologies and decarbonisation as evidenced in their top five priorities1:
Surrey Heath Borough Council’s Economic Development priorities.
IT and Digital Carbon Footprints.
As with many UK Local authorities, Surrey Heath Borough Council’s climate strategy is broad, encompassing all departments and activities, including IT
The IT team were looking for ways of both making tangible carbon reductions, while also raising awareness across the local authority and broader community about the hidden impacts of digital technologies.
Knowing that over time, the Council’s website had become unintentionally bloated with unoptimised assets such as images and videos, the team were concerned that their website carbon footprint was potentially a larger contributor to their overall carbon footprint than necessary.
To address this, they decided to rebuild their entire website on new technology with a focus on being able to both lower the carbon footprint and to be able to more easily understand and manage it over time.
In line with the website overhaul, Surrey Heath Borough Council decided to implement Digital Carbon Online to be able to continuously monitor how the carbon footprint of their website changed and easily discover areas within the site that needed optimising.
How Digital Carbon Online has helped Surrey Heath Borough Council.
With only a couple of months since activation it is still early days, yet Digital Carbon Online has already helped both with carbon reduction and education.
Through the use of the built-in dashboard, the team have been able to identify pages on the website that are contributing higher than expected CO2e emissions, and have been able to make optimisations that will lead to carbon reductions.
Additionally, the data, charts, tables and insights presented with the dashboards has helped with their goals of raising awareness of the digital carbon impact across the Council.
What Surrey Heath Borough Council Like about Digital Carbon Online.
Overall, the team find the ease of use and approachability of the information a powerful tool. The dashboards help them understand the holistic carbon footprint of their whole website, while also highlighting specific pages that need optimising.
On top of this, the straightforward nature of the data makes it easy to communicate with their stakeholders, driving awareness not just of website carbon footprints but the broader topic of digital technologies unintended consequences, too.