Digital Impacts Schema and Taxonomy (DIST) is open-source, community driven and stewarded by Green Web Foundation with the support of other digital sustainability professionals for public benefit.

Our community

A big thank you to the group of sustainability professionals collaborating with us to bring DIST to life. Special shout outs to:

• Oliver Cronk, founder of Cronk Advisory.

DIST builds upon the open-source Technology Carbon Standard project by Scott Logic.

Our vision and why this project exists

Sustainability reporting is really difficult, and the complexity only goes up when you apply it to digital technologies. DIST exists to help people in organizations trying to do the right thing and get a handle on the environmental impacts of digital technologies.

We want to help make the invisible impacts visible and the incomparable organizations comparable.

Our vision is an open-source, well maintained and trust suite of tools that enables any organization to understand and report on the full spectrum of their technology estate’s impacts in a consistent, machine-readable, and comparable format. We’re working towards a shared language for digital impacts that is:

• Practical enough for a mid-sized organization to start using tomorrow with whatever data they have

• Rigorous enough to satisfy auditors, regulators and standards bodies

• Broad enough to cover planetary, societal and individual impacts

• Flexible enough to accommodate evolving measurement methodologies without breaking backwards compatibility

• Open enough to be adopted, extended and improved by anyone

The problem(s) we are solving

1. There is no shared structure / schema / taxonomy for reporting technology impacts including but also beyond carbon.

   Organizations that want to report on water, e-waste, or societal harms alongside their carbon data have no consistent format to do it in. This makes benchmarking, comparison and aggregation impossible. Every organization invents their own approach, if they report at all.

2. Existing standards and frameworks are siloed by impact type.

   Carbon has TCS, GHG Protocol, SCI. Water has ISO 14046. E-waste has the WEEE Directive. Societal impacts have emerging academic frameworks but nothing practical. There is no schema that brings these together in a way that’s useful for technology teams and the wider stakeholder ecosystem.

3. Data transparency is inconsistent and mostly not machine-readable.

   Even where organizations do report, the data sits in PDFs, annual reports and marketing materials. It is not structured, not discoverable, and not comparable. The carbon.txt project has begun solving this for carbon and sustainability reporting data. We need to extend that pattern.

4. The conversation about technology sustainability is too narrow. There’s a risk that digital sustainability becomes synonymous with carbon, green coding and energy efficiency. These matter, but they are not enough. Both planetary boundaries and social foundations are affected by technology. We need a schema that reflects this breadth.

5. Supplier impact data is inconsistent, incomparable, and often absent.

   Organizations increasingly want to understand the impacts of the digital services provided to them by their technology suppliers: cloud platforms, SaaS applications, managed services, and others. But there is no consistent way for suppliers to report this information. Each vendor has their own format (if they report at all), making it impossible for customers to compare suppliers or aggregate impacts across their supply chain. This is a problem the TCS case studies identified repeatedly: supplier data availability is one of the biggest barriers to accurate reporting. The schema provides a shared format that works for both sides of the supplier-customer relationship.

Get involved

All contributions to push forward and maintain this work are welcome, from minor suggestions, to more regular involvement or financial donations. Big or small, there lots of ways to get involved. Get involved.