NTT has developed what it said is the world’s first framework enabling companies to calculate CO₂ emissions across the entire software product life cycle.
The rules are based on the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry’s Carbon Footprint Guidelines, covering everything from procurement and design through to operation and disposal.
While the ICT sector is projected to account for more than 20% of global power consumption by 2030, software emissions have historically been difficult to measure.
In March 2024, with the support of the Ministry, NTT came up with version 1.0 Cradle-to-Gate, which made it possible to evaluate emissions during development.
However, since software products are generally used for a long period of time after development, it’s not been easy to evaluate the amount of emissions created through the entire life cycle of software products – and these emissions can be significant.
“While software does not consume physical resources on its own, it indirectly increases energy consumption through the use of the cloud, data centers, networks and user terminals, affecting the overall environmental impact of the ICT sector,” said the firm.
“At the same time, in recent years, there has been increasing social demand for companies to disclose their Scope 3 emissions, and the disclosure of emissions resulting from software products is becoming increasingly important as a means of evaluating procurement and determining transactions.”
Tracking software’s environmental impact
The calculations cover three main areas. First, they define and systematize the scope of assessment of software product emissions throughout the entire life cycle.
In the past, CO2 emissions assessments for software have been limited to the development stage, or have been comprehensively covered as a whole, said NTT.
This rule focuses on software products themselves, and organizes the emission sources and calculation processes that should be considered at the use and disposal stages, as well as at the development stage – allowing organizations to evaluate the entire life cycle on a consistent basis.
The second is the calculation of emissions at the estimation stage, before software development and operation – a rule that’s intended to be used for proposals and product design in green product procurement.
This can be done by limiting the processes subject to calculation to those directly related to software operations that can be worked out by developers in advance.
Finally, the framework incudes practice-focused calculation rules for international applications that can be used not only in Japan but also globally.
Looking ahead, NTT said it plans to promote the use of these calculation rules both within and outside the NTT Group, and accumulate a set of calculation results.
Based on what it learns about the breakdown and characteristics of emissions in individual cases identified through power consumption measurement experiments, it will analyze trends in emissions caused by differences in software products and usage conditions.
The company said it also plans to promote the creation of effective reduction technologies, as well as the reaction of a third-party certification scheme.
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