# Best practice 15.1 – Define your organization’s current environmental impact
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 As an organization, you should track your progress towards your sustainability goals. By determining your current environmental impact, you can track and report improvements as you make changes over time. Without knowing where you are you can’t know how far you’ve come. 

 **How do you track your analytics carbon footprint?** 

## Suggestion 15.1.1 – Determine the carbon emissions of your workload using the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool
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 Determining the current carbon emissions of your analytics workloads at the start of your optimization journey is important as it enables you to track your changes and see what efforts have the biggest impact. If you are an AWS user, your organization can use the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool. The AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool is a data tracking and visualization tool that reports on your AWS accounts carbon usage. 

 Your organization should maintain an audit trail of the changes that your team have made, when they were made, and the impact that the changes had on the carbon footprint of each workload. 

 For more details, refer to the following information: 
+ [AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool](https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-customer-carbon-footprint-tool/) 
+  [AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqhAnLdg3rg) 
+ [ Sustainability Pillar Improvement Process ](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/sustainability-pillar/improvement-process.html)
+  [Sustainability Pillar Improvement Process](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/sustainability-pillar/improvement-process.html) 

## Suggestion 15.1.2 – Define and track your progress using proxy metrics
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 When something is hard or impractical or very difficult to measure directly, you can instead use a related measurements in its place. This is called a *proxy metric*. 

 Environmental impact is hard to measure directly, especially when you want fine-grained measurements. However, in the cloud, the environmental impact of a workload is often correlated with efficiency, which is also often correlated with cost. Just like you can apply many of the best practices of the performance efficiency and cost optimization pillars to lower your environmental impact, you can also use performance metrics and cost as proxy metrics to track your progress. 

 For more details, refer to the following information: 
+ [ Evaluate specific improvements ](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/sustainability-pillar/evaluate-specific-improvements.html)
+ [ Turning Cost and Usage Reports into Efficiency Reports ](https://catalog.workshops.aws/well-architected-sustainability/en-US/5-process-and-culture/cur-reports-as-efficiency-reports)
+ [ Best practice 8.3 – Define and measure the computing performance metrics ](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/analytics-lens/best-practice-8.3---define-and-measure-the-computing-performance-metrics..html)