Understand and reduce your carbon impact with Cloudflare

Your Carbon Impact Report: What It Shows and How It Works

As part of Cloudflare's Impact Week, the company has released a new dashboard tool designed to give customers visibility into the environmental effects of operating their web properties. The Carbon Impact Report, available now for all Cloudflare accounts, estimates the carbon savings achieved by running sites and applications on Cloudflare's network.

The release comes amid a broader company commitment to power its network with 100% renewable energy. The tool also addresses customer demand for clearer data on the indirect emissions associated with the services they use, commonly referred to as "Scope 3" emissions.

Why Internet Infrastructure Has a Carbon Footprint

Internet infrastructure affects the environment because powering hardware such as servers consumes energy. Depending on the source of that energy, its production can release carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. When a customer uses Cloudflare, energy is consumed to power the hardware that delivers content. The central question the new report answers is how that energy use compares with serving the same content over an average internet connection.

How the Savings Are Calculated

The majority of Cloudflare's energy consumption comes from powering edge servers to serve content. To attribute a portion of that impact to an individual customer, Cloudflare uses the following approach:

When you use Cloudflare, data from requests destined to your Internet property goes through our edge. Data transfer for your Internet properties roughly represents a fraction of the energy consumed at Cloudflare's edge. If we sum up the data transfer for your Internet properties and multiply that number by the energy it takes to power each request (derived from our emissions report and overall usage data), we can approximate the total carbon impact of powering your Internet properties with Cloudflare.

To measure the savings, Cloudflare compares that figure against what usage would look like without its network:

Using public information on average data center energy usage and the International Energy Agency's global average emissions for energy usage, we can calculate the carbon cost of data transfer through average (non-Cloudflare) networks. We can then compare these numbers to arrive at your carbon savings from using Cloudflare.

The dashboard displays the carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) saved by a given account through Cloudflare usage during 2020. To make the abstract unit more intuitive, the report offers a familiar comparison:

Standard light bulbs are 60 watts, so we know that turning on a light bulb for an hour uses 0.06 kilowatt-hours of energy. According to the EPA, that's about 42 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent. That means that if your carbon dioxide equivalent saving is 126 grams, that's approximately the same impact as turning off a light bulb for three hours.

Beyond the Numbers: How Cloudflare Cuts Emissions

Cloudflare purchases Renewable Energy Credits to offset the energy used by its network, meaning customer traffic is effectively powered by renewable sources. The company points to several additional ways its services reduce overall carbon footprints:

• Consolidating hardware: Using cloud-based security and performance services such as WAF, Network Firewall, and DDoS mitigation lets customers retire specialized on-premises hardware. Those functions run as efficient software at Cloudflare's edge, which cuts the energy needed to operate a network stack.
• Optimizing content delivery: Features like Image Resizing reduce the data payload for end users, lowering the energy required to load pages and decreasing downstream carbon emissions.
• Green hosting: Because Cloudflare is a certified green host, content hosted on Pages or Workers KV is backed by renewable energy.

What Comes Next

The initial report covers 2020 data, aligned with Cloudflare's published emissions inventory for that year. The company says it is working toward providing more dynamic reporting, with plans to offer carbon savings updates at a quarterly or monthly granularity in the future.