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Sustainability considerations
Here are guidelines and resources we recommend for projects with sustainability goals relating to climate action, such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 13: Climate action, and SBTi’s Corporate Net-Zero Standard.
Standards
To account for the emissions of websites and track their reduction, we recommend following:
- ITU L.1420 and L.1430
- GHG Protocol Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard (Scope 3), and its additional ICT Sector Guidance.
Those are the same standards used to assess the sustainability of Wagtail.
Guidelines
Here are guidelines we would recommend applying to Wagtail websites:
- Sustainable Web Design Strategies
- GR491
- Green Design Principles by Microsoft (PDF)
- Green Software Foundation Patterns
The Sustainable Web Design W3C Community Group is also working on Web Environmental Sustainability Guidelines, which will be highly relevant once published.
Quantifying emissions
To quantify the emissions of a Wagtail website, we recommend three different approaches:
- The Sustainable Web Design model, which uses page weight as a metric of energy efficiency, and page views as a metric of site utilisation. This model has clear known limitations, but is nonetheless ideal to provide high-level figures for a wide range of websites or pages.
- Infrastructure-based calculators such as Cloud Carbon Footprint, a measurement and analysis tools.
- Measurement orchestration tools such as Green Metrics, GreenFrame, Scaphandre.
We are working upon those considerations as part of Wagtail's development process. An example of this is the two Google Summer of Code internships focusing on sustainability, in partnership with the Green Web Foundation and Green Coding Berlin.