• Select your audit team which can be a wholly external auditing team or a mix of internal and external expertise. The final team mix should carry out an accurate standards based audit of your organisation’s direct and indirect ICT carbon footprint.

• There are several ICT carbon and energy footprint standards that can be used to assess your business. The standards developed by JRC, ISO, the GHG Protocol, and BSI are all suitable for being integrated into measures to determine the carbon and energy footprint of your ICT. The relevant standards will generally be decided by the auditor.

Before beginning, it is important to clearly define what constitutes the full extent your organisation. This is especially important if you are introducing separate policies for your organisation within a larger business. Defining these boundaries is the first step when auditing your current ICT carbon footprint. There are two general types of boundaries that should be considered.

• Organisational boundaries allow a business to distinguish between the carbon footprint from activities that are attributable to your organisation and those that are not.

• Operational boundaries define the emissions that are owned or controlled by your business and can be categorised as either direct or indirect.

For any business, it is important to identify the sources of your ICT carbon footprint and accurately measure them. This will provide a baseline indicating where your business is now, and is used to help set future targets. It will also help to identify the biggest emissions generating activities and the changes that will have the greatest impact on reducing them. The carbon footprint for an organisation can be classified as:

• The direct carbon footprint associated with the energy and resources required to manufacture, deliver, install and dispose of all ICT equipment used by your organisation and also the small share of the external support infrastructure your organisation uses such as cloud computing, data centres and communication networks.

• The direct carbon footprint associated with the generation, transmission and storage of data within the business along with the share of the energy used by external support infrastructure such as cloud computing, data centres and communication networks.

• The indirect carbon footprint associated with external activities such as staff remote working practices (work from home etc.). This can include a staff member’s own IP equipment and network data traffic associated with their work.

Carry out a comprehensive operations wide audit of your organisation’s greenhouse gas emissions within clearly defined system boundaries. Carbon footprint calculations should be based on recognised standard methodologies (ISO 14064) and can use the GHG Protocol Scopes 1,2 and 3 to make distinctions between different emissions sources.

Generate a detailed and actionable report based on the results.

An emissions baseline is the reference point against which a business or country’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will be measured going forward. Baseline emissions are calculated by looking at a 'baseline emissions period', usually the past 1 to 5 years of an organisation’s activity.

Baseline emissions are critical to measuring the success of a project to reduce GHG emissions and determine whether emission reduction targets are being met. Any change in the volume of greenhouse gases produced compared to the baseline during a specified reporting period can be used to calculate the net reduction in emissions for that period.

If no action is taken to reduce emissions, this is the level at which they can be expected to remain.

Any categories of Scope 3 emissions that are not measured should have valid justifications. Many companies report on two or three of the fifteen scope 3 categories but do not publish clear reasons for the exclusion of other categories.

Set out a schedule for regular follow up audits to monitor progress usually on an annual basis. Alternatively, implement a continuous audit process using software tools to log activities an generate regular reports.