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SUS06-BP01 Communicate and cascade your sustainability goals - AWS Well-Architected Framework

SUS06-BP01 Communicate and cascade your sustainability goals

Technology is a key enabler of sustainability. IT teams play a crucial role in driving meaningful change towards your organization's sustainability goals. These teams should clearly understand the company's sustainability targets and work to communicate and cascade those priorities across its operations.

Common anti-patterns:

  • You don't know your organization's sustainability goals and how they apply to your team.

  • You have insufficient awareness and training about the environmental impact of cloud workloads.

  • You are unsure about the specific areas to prioritize.

  • You do not involve your employees and customers in your sustainability initiatives.

Benefits of establishing this best practice: From optimization of infrastructure and systems to use of innovative technologies, IT teams can reduce the organization's carbon emissions and minimize resource consumption. Communication of sustainability goals can provide the ability for IT teams continuously improve and adapt to evolving sustainability challenges. Additionally, these sustainable optimizations often translate to cost savings as well, which strengthens the business case.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Medium

Implementation guidance

The primary sustainability goals for IT teams should be to optimize systems and solutions to increase resource efficiency and minimize the organization's carbon footprint and overall environmental impact. Shared services and initiatives like training programs and operational dashboards can support organizations as they optimize IT operations and build solutions that can help significantly reduce the carbon footprint. The cloud presents an opportunity not only to move physical infrastructure and energy procurement responsibilities to the shared responsibility of the cloud provider but also to continuously optimize the resource efficiency of cloud-based services.

When teams use the cloud's inherent efficiency and shared responsibility model, they can drive meaningful reductions in the organization's environmental impact. This, in turn, can contribute to the organization's overall sustainability goals and demonstrate the value of these teams as strategic partners in the journey towards a more sustainable future.

Implementation steps

  • Define goals and objectives: Establish well-defined goals for your IT program. This involves getting input from responsible stakeholders from different departments such as IT, sustainability, and finance. These teams should define measurable goals that align with your organization's sustainability goals, including areas such carbon reduction and resource optimization.

  • Understand the carbon accounting boundaries of your business: Understand how carbon accounting methods like the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol relate to your workloads in the cloud (for more detail, see Cloud sustainability).

  • Use cloud solutions for carbon accounting: Use cloud solutions such as carbon accounting solutions on AWS to track scope one, two, and three for GHG emissions across your operations, portfolios, and value chains. With these solutions, organizations can streamline GHG emission data acquisition, simplify reporting, and derive insights to inform their climate strategies.

  • Monitor the carbon footprint of your IT portfolio: Track and report carbon emissions of your IT systems. Use the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool to track, measure, review, and forecast the carbon emissions generated from your AWS usage.

  • Communicate resource usage through proxy metrics to your teams: Track and report on your resource usage through proxy metrics. In the on-demand pricing models of the cloud, resource usage is related to cost, which is a generally-understandable metric. At a minimum, use cost as a proxy metric to communicate the resource usage and improvements by each team.

  • Continuously optimize and evaluate: Use an improvement process to continuously optimize your IT systems, including cloud workload for efficiency and sustainability. Monitor carbon footprint before and after implementation of optimization strategy. Use the reduction in carbon footprint to assess the effectiveness.

  • Foster a sustainability culture: Use training programs (like AWS Skill Builder) to educate your employees about sustainability. Engage them in sustainability initiatives. Share and celebrate their success stories. Use incentives to award them if they achieve sustainability targets.

Resources

Related documents:

Related videos:

Related examples:

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