Three out of four developers will lead with sustainability as their primary development principle by 2025, according to Google Cloud Group Product Manager Steren Giannini.

"For the longest time, the focus was elsewhere. We needed to build it fast, build it securely, build it as simply as possible, [with] data at the lowest cost. But now it's also time to build it sustainably," he said during a Google Cloud Next keynote earlier this fall.

Sustainability is too important to be complicated, he argued, and while enterprises seem to be moving in the right direction, they still struggle to take action. "Sixty-five percent of IT executives said they want to improve their sustainability efforts, but don't know how to do it, [and] 36% of them said they didn't even have the measurement tools in place to track sustainability progress," Giannini said. "We can't ignore the urgency required from all of us to meet climate targets."

Gianini highlighted Google Cloud's carbon footprint tool for its ability to show enterprises better data about their environmental impact and aid in measuring, reporting, and reducing cloud carbon emissions.

"The underlying methodology is quite unique and is based on actual measurements of the energy used by machines in our data center," Giannini said.

"It is also the complete picture of your emissions – not only emissions coming from electricity production, but also onsite fossil fuel emissions and other embedded emissions coming from data center hardware," he explained. Users can also break down data by project, region, or Google Cloud product and export that cloud emissions data to the hyperscaler's BigQuery tool for further analysis and emissions reporting processes.

The tool also helps organizations build new applications that emit less carbon "by making the right choice at the right time" and identifying low carbon compute regions. "Let's say you want to deploy a new application to the U.S. west coast. From a latency perspective, all of these options are very similar. Without more info, you might have picked Las Vegas, which happens to have a relatively carbon-intense electricity grid. But up in Oregon, you'd find a very clean grid full of hydropower, and therefore, low carbon intensity," he said.

Choosing to deploy an application in Oregon instead of Las Vegas can reduce gross electricity emissions by 80%, saving both money and carbon. "When we tested this feature, we noticed new users were 50% more likely to choose a low carbon region when they saw the icon, and that can make a very big difference," Giannini added.