BoaviztAPI: A Bottom-Up Model to Assess the Environmental Impacts of Cloud Services

Awareness surrounding the environmental impacts of the digital industry has led numerous professionals to incorporate these considerations into their work. However, the conceptualization of environmental impacts has often been narrowed to the scope of carbon footprint. This limitation can be attributed to various technical and data accessibility constraints, hindering a comprehensive evaluation, including a multi-criteria analysis over the entire life cycle of digital technologies. In response to these limitations, we introduce a comprehensive bottom-up evaluation method suitable for servers and cloud instances, employing a life cycle thinking approach. We start by modelling the life cycle impacts of a server based on its hardware configuration. Then, we aggregate these with the impacts of its technical and physical environment to define the impacts of a cloud platform. We finally model the impacts of a cloud instance as a portion of the cloud platform. The proposed approach has been implemented as an open-source toolkit and published as an API. This initiative aims to provide developers and researchers with a tool for conducting environmental evaluations of their infrastructure based on open data and open methodologies, enhancing their ability to explore the environmental materiality of ICT products, services, and infrastructures.