ITU-T Recommendations

Supplement 55 to ITU-T L-series Recommendations explores the environmental sustainability of data centres during their entire life cycle, factoring in a broad spectrum of energy and environmental aspects that needs to be addressed to achieve the relevant United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, to support the development of sustainable data centres and cloud-computing services. An integrated approach addressing both technical and implementation challenges is applied to yield actionable insights to policy makers and industry experts.
As the role of data centres and cloud computing increases, so are the concerns over their energy use and its cost, as well as the associated impacts on climate change and environment. In recent years, the data centre and cloud industry has made great progress in enhancing energy efficiency and adopting renewable energy sources. However, a sole focus on energy efficiency may cause burden shifting and overlook other relevant environmental impacts stemming from other parts of the data centre life cycle and cloud-computing value chain.