Understand impact areas

Back in 2010, Christina Figueres, the former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and chief architect behind the 2015 Paris agreement, said that “the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) is to the future of business what the X-ray was to the future of medicine – without it, doctors could never see the inside of a patient’s health.” Establishing a GHG emission baseline gives you the necessary insights into your IT organization’s climate health and what necessary actions you need to take to transition into a sustainable IT enterprise. In this section, we will take a closer look at what you need to know to assess your impact through a top-down assessment. Suppose you are not interested in how I calculated these numbers, and you are just interested in getting started with your carbon emission baseline. In that case, I recommend you skip ahead to the next section. The numbers presented in this chapter...