The data center industry is due for an environmental sustainability makeover, according to the conversations that took place at professional services firm JLL's 2022 Data Center Forum.

The discussion sought "to create an environment to define issues impacting the industry and educate, collaborate, and challenge the way we deploy and operate data centers today,” Brian Kortendick, JLL executive director of global data center strategy, said in a statement.

"Sustainability is at the forefront of industry challenges, [and] we all, together, need a concentrated effort to develop new concepts, practices, and innovative approaches to achieve sustainability goals," Kortendick added.

It's common to hear that you can't reduce emissions until you accurately measure them, but that principle actually gets more granular: organizations can't even measure something until it's been clearly defined, the forum concluded.

JLL recommends organizations across all industries prepare carbon accounting strategies, also known as greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting, along with carbon tagging – a process that summarizes GHG data as a building block of broader corporate carbon accounting.

Data centers, similar to typical commercial real estate assets, have a high initial carbon output. And data centers' reliance on energy consumption means their carbon footprint continues to climb once they're operating.

This leaves data center owners with "an obligation to invest in sustainable ways of doing business," JLL noted, citing 96% of its clients with defined environmental sustainability goals for their organization.

However, just 19% of those clients have publicly committed to those goals and invested funds into executing sustainability plans – highlighting the gap between what needs to be done and reality.

"Whether self-regulated through something like the iMasons Climate Accord or more strictly regulated through the [Securities and Exchange Commission] in the U.S. and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive in the [European Union], the industry will soon have much more robust need for sustainability assessment, accounting, reporting, and monitoring,” according to Sean Farney, JLL executive director for data center strategy and innovation.

The forum noted the industry's prowess at adapting and improving when necessary also means it should be able to excel at sustainable operations. "All operational elements within the data center space represent sustainability opportunities," JLL explained.

To take advantage of those opportunities, enterprises should assess their mechanical and electrical plants and use reliability-based maintenance to structure investments and asset replacements around sustainable operations goals.

The tradeoff between investing in something for its sustainability potential and investing in something to increase revenue generation has been a major challenge, and JLL's Head of Growth and Business Development Daniel Kirschner expects it to remain that way.

"The key is strong governance with top-down support and initiatives that take advantage of both increasing reliability and reducing carbon output concurrently. Both objectives can go hand in hand with a proactive, and predictive, maintenance and replacement approach," he said.