Abletech and CO2 emissions — growing our understanding
Late last year I documented our first attempt to understand Abletech’s contribution to CO2 emissions. Seeking to both understand, and measure, our contributions, has been an enlightening process.
One area we omitted from our first attempt is the contribution that comes from Cloud Hosting, the majority of which, for Abletech, is on AWS in Sydney.
To help us understand this better we have drawn on Merrin Macleod’s excellent talk at Ruby Conf AU on ‘Environment Variables’. She looked into how cloud hosting contributes to CO2e, and specifically addressed our region of the world. I highly recommend taking a look at her talk here.
Based on Merrin’s estimates, we have made our first attempt to better quantify how our hosting arrangements contribute to our carbon emissions and they are significant! The graph below shows our tonnes of CO2e since we started measuring a few months ago.
Now we have this new understanding of our CO2e sources we are better armed to look at the options we have to reduce, or offset, our emissions. Thank you Merrin for helping to grow our understanding!
