Anil Madhavapeddy

Towards verifiable, privacy-preserving carbon emissions claims / Dec 2024

Customers of online services may want to take carbon emissions into account when deciding which service to use, but it's currently difficult to do so due to the lack of reliable emissions data that is comparable across online services. There's a lot of muddled data out there, and calculating accurate carbon emissions across a computing pipeline involves a number of stakeholders, none of whom are incentivised to accurately report their emissions for competitive reasons!

In this LOCO paper, Jessica Man lead our exploration of mechanisms to support verifiable and privacy-preserving emissions reporting across a chain of energy suppliers, cloud data centres, virtual machine hosting services providers and cloud services providers. The idea is that all of this can ultimately be exposed to APIs that can be consumed by client devices in order to let consumers make direct choices about their decisions based on relative environmental impacts.