Climate action and technology
Many governments around the world have made commitments to introduce measures to reduce their impact on the climate, and have become signatories to the Paris Agreement committing to introduce specific emission reductions by 2050. The sustainability pillar supports this action by exploring how a government might reduce the environmental impact of its own services. Many jurisdictions have introduced sustainable procurement rules that provide broad guidance of the considerations an entity should undertake when considering the procurement of a new product or service.
Exploring the digitization of other government functions will contribute to how a government might reduce the climate impacts of its operations. The government will need to review existing digitized services and identifying opportunities for optimization, while also exploring how digital technologies might be deployed to accelerate sustainability outcomes.
Sustainable digital services are designed, developed, and operated in a way that minimizes their impact on the environment while still meeting business goals and user needs. These services are designed to support sustainability goals by reducing energy consumption, reducing carbon emissions, minimizing waste, and promoting resource efficiency. In some jurisdictions, there are specific targets to meet.
| GL-SUS-01: What are the sustainability policies for the jurisdiction that your service operates within? |
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Document the public and governmental sustainability reporting mechanisms. Identify relevant sustainability metrics, reporting, targets, and policies that not only reduce resource usage for the government customer, but also across the sector and nationally.
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Improvement plan – Encourage the organization to consider public sustainability performance reporting in their forward planning for the service.
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Minimize duplication of computing power where possible. Leverage and enable reusable environments, patterns, and marketplaces as a way to minimize duplication of computing power.
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Improvement plan – Encourage the organization to minimize computing power where possible in the service.
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Share best sustainability practice across the jurisdiction or sector. Use cross-agency, cross-jurisdiction, and cross-sector collaboration to identify and learn from examples of similar problems in other areas.
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Improvement plan – Encourage the organization to engage with jurisdictional sustainability best practice throughout the delivery of the service.
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Identify sharable data where appropriate, internal and external. Sharing data proactively can reduce system inefficiencies. Explore the data, APIs, and tools that could be leveraged by other government departments, the broader economy, and the community to spur the scaling of digital government applications.
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Improvement plan – Support the organization to include data, insights, or both in the architectural design.
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Identify sustainability policies relevant to the organization. Identify any sustainable procurement guidelines or policies that a jurisdiction might have to adopt, such as the Green Public Procurement
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Improvement plan – Encourage the organization to understand and adopt relevant sustainability policies in the design, delivery, and management of the service.
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| GL-SUS-02: What design choices have been made in the service definition that is inclusive of sustainability policy outcomes and reporting requirements? |
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Identify and design or deliver inclusively of jurisdictional sustainability goals. Verify that national sustainability goals and reporting are built in from the beginning, or have a funded plan to have them created over time.
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Improvement plan – Identify if broader sustainability goals are relevant to the service and how.
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Leverage contextual design methods, like life journey based service design. Take a more holistic view using modes, such as life events or user journeys, to produce an improved customer experience as well as better sustainability outcomes by reducing duplication and consolidating services.
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Improvement plan – Identify the end user context or journey as a means to identifying opportunities to consolidate or reduce duplication of resourcing.
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Minimize physical impact of services, such as printing. Design services so that they can be completed entirely digitally by reducing the need for printing documents, such as eliminating the need for physical signatures or documents.
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Improvement plan – Use end-to-end service design to minimize physical printing and environmental impacts of the service.
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| GL-SUS-03: How might this solution be built to be extendable to other opportunities in the future? |
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Leverage automation and virtualization where possible. Explore the opportunity to deploy digital technologies by rethinking existing processes that might improve operational efficiencies, for example, using smart technologies to manage built environments.
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Improvement plan – Plan around maximum virtualization of services and where components might be made available as a utility for ease of reuse.
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Leverage low energy sensor technologies for early detection and modelling opportunities. Leverage new technologies, such as IoT, digital twins, and AI analysis and modelling to support more sustainable systems, decision making, and services.
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Improvement plan – Support the organization to identify opportunities to leverage sensor and modelling technologies in the service, where appropriate.
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