Google Cloud today launched new sustainability products aimed to help businesses better quantify, report, and reduce their carbon emissions. With its new sustainability products, the cloud provider claims to make it simpler for businesses to meet the demands of investors and consumers by giving businesses more avenues for transparent ESG reporting. 

“It's clear that sustainability is top of mind for every CEO and board,” Jen Bennett, who leads Google Cloud’s data and technology strategy for sustainability in the office of the CTO, said during a Google Cloud Next pre-briefing. 

Carbon Footprint is a tool that allows Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers to measure, track, and report gross carbon emissions associated with their cloud usage. “Customers can leverage this data for reporting as well as internal audits and carbon reduction efforts,” Bennett said.

Finding and understanding emissions data is one of the first steps in beginning to reduce carbon emissions and move toward a greener future. “Accounting for carbon emissions is necessary to measure progress against carbon reduction targets,” Bennett added.

Google Cloud has published the carbon emissions calculation methodology used in Carbon Footprint, providing further transparency for auditors and reporting teams. 

Google Cloud will now alert its customers of the carbon footprint associated with idle cloud instances. Customers can then choose to delete those instances, lowering their carbon footprint.  

Similarly, the cloud giant’s Active Assist Recommender service now includes a sustainability impact category, where the Unattended Project Recommender API resides. This API uses machine learning to identify projects that are most likely abandoned based on usage of cloud services, networking and API activity, and billing. 

Deleting those abandoned projects mitigates a company’s overall carbon footprint, reduces costs, and manages security risks.

Google Earth Engine is another new sustainability feature available for GCP enterprise customers that combines Google Maps, Cloud AI, and BigQuery within Earth Engine.

The tool uses its catalogue of satellite imagery, geospatial data sets, and planetary scale analysis capabilities “to detect changes, map trends, and quantify differences on the Earth's surface,” Bennett said. 

Using this data, Earth Engine helps develop solutions for responsible commodity sourcing, sustainable land management, and carbon emissions reductions. 

The tool also helps businesses save on operational costs, improve risk management, and bolster resilience to climate threats, Bennett added. Companies can “track, monitor, and predict changes in the Earth's surface due to extreme weather events or human-caused activities,” she explained. 

Bennett noted that GCP customers face challenges of how their business is impacting the natural environment, as well as how their businesses will be affected by climate change, adding that answers lay in planetary data sets, improved analytics tools, and smarter models to predict possible outcomes.