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 the 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 the guidelines we would recommend applying to Wagtail websites:

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 utilization. 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 on 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.