ict sector guidance to the ghg protocol product accounting and reporting standard.docx

7/29/2019 ICT Sector Guidance to the GHG Protocol Product Accounting and Reporting Standard.docx

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The GHG Product standard

The GHG Protocol through the World Resource Institute have published a Sector Guidance to the GHG Protocol Product

Accounting and Reporting Standard (referred to as the Product Standard). This guidance follows a Life Cycle approach to

the assessment of ICT Products.

The Product Standard defines Products to be both goods and services so for the ICT sector this covers physical ICTequipment and delivered ICT services. (In the Sector Guidance networks are also included in the definition of Products,

as an ICT service) and has specific focus on the assessment of ICT services including telecom networks.

The Sector Guidance presents alternative approaches and estimation techniques, and where appropriate a hierarchy of

approaches is provided for the estimation of GHG emission from ICT based services. The specific approach to be taken by

the practitioner will depend on the objective of the assessment, the level of precision that is required, and the data that

is available (and the associated cost of collecting further data.

ICT products also may have the potential for reducing GHG emissions through the enabling effect. This Guidance

provides guidance for assessing the enabling effect of ICT

The purpose of this ICT Sector Guidance is to address the inherent nature of ICT Products and particularly the followingpoints:

Multiple components for ICT equipment Complex supply chains for ICT equipment Complex nature of ICT Services Significant in-use stage of ICT Products Uncertainty surrounding measurement of use stage Potential enabling effect of ICT Products

However, the current state of this work is still in development and has limitations. It is far from routine for ICTcompanies to automatically carry out GHG assessments on all their products. Generally, data collection systems cannot

readily provide the data needed to carry out an assessment. Reliable and consistent sources of secondary emissions

factors for ICT components are not easily available. Reliable data on the actual use of ICT products is difficult to

determine. Therefore, currently, GHG assessments are typically carried out as individual projects, rather than being a

routine business activity. As the work of measuring GHG emissions continues, more comprehensive datasets will be

developed allowing more wide spread practice of GHG assessments of products.

A further significant issue for the ICT sector is the rapidly changing and evolving nature of the technology. This

potentially has a number of effects, for example: development of new products; technology being used in new and

unexpected ways; new technologies driving different user and social behaviors; development of more energy efficient

ICT equipment changing underlying assumptions between in-use and embodied emissions; development of equipment

with built-in measurement capabilities (e.g. device energy consumption, network traffic monitoring and reporting, power

saving mode monitoring and reporting).

The Guidance has a strong focus on the assessment of ICT services, and here the approach is to describe clearly what the

definition and boundaries of the service are, and what the constituent elements that make up the service are. Then each

of the constituent elements can be considered as a building block and assessed individually, with the total impact

being assessed by summing the impact of all the individual building blocks.


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This provides for a more consistent and efficient approach. Examples of constituent elements would be:

Individual items of ICT equipment; Use of networks; use of shared equipment (e.g. Data Centers); Use of software; maintenance and Help desk support.

This approach allows for the use of secondary and proxy data for minor items in a system that otherwise would be too

onerous to assess on an individual custom basis.

Sector Guidance is not intended to support product comparisons for which separate rules and standards are to be

created

Specifically for ICT products the following are particularly relevant: to understand emissions through the life cycle of the

product, and where in the life cycle the majority of the emissions occur (e.g. understanding the proportion of embodied

to in-use emissions).

This can help to direct efforts to reduce emissions of the product such as:

Reduction of emissions due to changes in the design of the product Reduction of emissions due to changes in the manufacture of a good, or provision of a service Reduction of emissions in the use phase of a product Reacting to behavioral changes in the use of the product Track changes over time, to monitor the impact of product enhancements and new versions of products To respond to customer questions on the GHG emissions of the product offering Public reporting of the GHG emissions of a product

The following are some of the issues and questions being raised in relation to ICT on both the positive and negative

carbon account. The Guidance document does not aim to directly answer these questions, but provides mechanisms

and tools with which these issues can be systematically investigated.

Rapid growth of ICT (e.g. driven by use of social networking, smart phones, mobile data usage, internet usage,internet TV, music and video streaming)

Exponential growth of data centers Increasing energy efficiency of computing and telecommunications Social changes driven by ICT Opportunities to reduce business related travel through Tele-working, Tele-commuting and Remote

Collaboration.

Opportunities to indirectly reduce emissions through the use of various smart technologies Rapid changes in technology and promises of new technology development leading to new unknown

opportunities and challenges

When is the best time to replace ICT equipment? Considering the improvements in energy efficiency of newequipment vs. the embodied emissions

As ICT equipment becomes more energy efficient the embodied emissions of the equipment becomeproportionately more significant compared to the use phase emissions.


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The Product Standard follows a life cycle approach to the assessment of products and builds on the framework and

requirements established in the ISO LCA standards: 14040:2006, Life Cycle Assessment: Principles and Framework and

14044:2006, Life Cycle Assessment: Requirements and Guidelines.

The PAS 2050 is a Publicly Available Specification (PAS) for the assessment of life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of

goods and services. It was first published in October 2008 by the British Standards Institution (BSI), in partnership with

the UK Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the Carbon Trust. A revised edition (PAS

2050:2011) was released in October 2011.

The ISO standard 14067 Carbon footprint of products -- Requirements and guidelines for quantification and

communication is currently under development, and expected to be published at the end of 2012.

All three standards (PAS 2050, Product Standard, and ISO 14067) address the assessment of life cycle GHG emissions for

products, and all are based on ISO 14040 and 14044. Considerable work has been done to ensure alignment on these

three standards through the relevant organizations responsible for developing them. The revised version of PAS

2050:2011 allowed even closer alignment of the Product Standard with the 20 PAS 2050.

Additionally the following principles were considered in developing the Guidance frameworks:

An assessment should include 100% of GHG emissions, Every effect need not be assessed in the same detail Elements that have larger impacts will typically require primary data Elements that have smaller impacts may be estimated, typically using secondary or proxy data or 33 using

modeling techniques

Omit an impact only if this is conservative.

When considering enabling effects, omit an impact if the scale of adoption is small and therefore does notsupport the assumption that this will achieve a positive impact

The assessment process is recursive; it starts with screening assessments, with proxies for similar productcategories, then improve the assumptions and data quality for the elements that have the larger impacts


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Guidance for ICT companies and other organizations applying the Product Standard to assess GHG emissions associated

with Telecom Network Service. It has been written primarily from a service provider perspective, but is also applicable to

organizations and practitioners assessing TNS provided by an internal function or an external provider, to help establish

strategic priorities for carbon reduction actions.

Examples of reasons to assess the greenhouse gas emissions of a TNS are as follows:

GHG emissions assessment may be conducted to assess a specific service delivered to a specific serviceproviders customer, for example as part of a bid or in response to a customer request. e.g. a service providers

customer may be asking for the GHG emissions associated with the delivery of an MPLS network service. In this

instance, it is likely that the assessment would be performed by the provider of the service

GHG emissions assessment may be undertaken to analyze a service being provided across one or moretelecoms networks, for example supply of a tele-presence service. The assessment is likely to be performed by

the tele-presence equipment supplier or by the telecoms service provider. In this case, the service is likely to be

using multiple networks from multiple network providers and a mix of different network types such as mobile

network, fixed line network, the internet etc.

GHG emissions assessment may be done to assess a particular services use across a whole network operatedby a single network provider, for example, assessment of an average one minute telephone call over a single

carriers network. In this case, the assessment would be performed by the carrier and currently the approach islikely to be a top-down average assessment of total energy used within the 38 network divided by total

number / length of the call or by total traffic in megabytes

GHG emissions assessment may be conducted to obtain a forecast analysis, for example for deploying a newnetwork service or a service for a new service providers customer.

Steps for calculating the GHG emission for Telecommunication services

1. Determine the Product Lifecycle

In terms of a TNS, equipment is used to provide services and there is a direct correspondence between the usestage of the equipment and the use stage of the service. The traditional product life cycle does not, however,

capture the service design and build stage, which include activities related to planning and organizing people,


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support equipment, communication and material components of a TNS. Thus for a TNS it is recommended to

include an additional life cycle stage of Service Deployment and Build.

2. Defining the elements of a TNS

For each element it is necessary to consider both the use stage emissions and the embodied emissionsassociated with the upstream and downstream stages of the ICT equipment used in delivery of the service. The

use stage combines the life cycle activities: usage and repair / maintenance servicing The embodied stage

combines the life cycle activities: raw material acquisition and preprocessing, production, distribution andtransport, installation and end-of-life treatment (i.e. all other life cycle stages)

3. Allocation and apportionment TNS like all ICT include significant instances where equipment is shared between services. As a consequence

both GHG emissions associated with equipment which comprise the TNS need to be apportioned between the

services using them.

This applies to both the customer domain and service platform, both in use and embodied stages, the sameapportionment process must be applied to operational activities.

The criterion by which apportionment should be made is critical to a consistent approach of GHG assessment..Apportionment may follow for example:

Usage based apportionment, e.g. number of subscribers or amount of data, Provisioned capacity (ports orbandwidth) Mean traffic across a network / equipment.

Other ICT LCA standards such as ETSI Environmental Engineering (EE); Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of ICTequipment, networks and services: General methodology and common requirements (section 5.3.3) may be

referenced for additional detailed guidance of apportionment of GHG emissions relating to TNS.


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4. Calculating inventory results assessing GHG emissions of a TNS

ict sector guidance to the ghg protocol product accounting and reporting standard.docx

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