Climate change has come into sharp focus in recent years, and rightly so. There is an increased pressure on businesses to contribute towards reducing our carbon emissions and improving our planet for future generations, in line with government targets and consumer’s conscientious buying habits.

A major step towards everyone reducing their carbon emissions is being able to measure and find areas to improve. We emit carbon in a vast number of ways in our daily lives, from travelling to heating our homes.

We also emit carbon, and contribute to its emissions, when we are using technology. As businesses become increasingly digital, this results in a large volume of carbon emissions.

As such, most of us use cloud services that impact our overall carbon footprint. However, cloud service providers like Microsoft are taking action to help users tackle their environmental impact.

Microsoft launch their Emissions Impact Dashboard

To help us understand the carbon footprint from the Microsoft cloud services we consume, Microsoft have released their Emissions Impact Dashboard. This is free to use for organisations with Microsoft products and services, and contains key details around the organisations’ emissions.

Hosted within Power BI, the report brings together data relating to usage, emissions, and areas for improvement.

Divided into tabs, it contains the following details:

• Dashboard
• Emissions details
• Emissions savings
• GHG Preparation report
• Usage report
• Calculation methodology

Each of these areas of the report can be filtered to a specific Azure subscription or service.

The report also provides the ability to estimate the emissions of an on-premise workload.

The report requires a Power BI Pro licence to run. You can get started here.

Once set up, the report can then be used to consistently report on carbon accounting and greenhouse gas emissions, optimise your decision making  and estimate further emission reductions which could be gained from moving apps and services to the cloud.

Drilling into the report’s details will allow you to view carbon emissions over time, by service and by location.

This useful tool clearly demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to help us all with the fight against climate change. If you are interested in setting up this dashboard for your business, please get in touch.