Digital Impacts Schema and Taxonomy (DIST): driving understanding and facilitating data sharing on the impacts of digital. Intended to consistently classify and quantify the impacts of technology use. Initially focused on adverse impacts to raise awareness, quantify and focus on the material challenges and measure progress on mitigation. Whilst there will be a governed, science-based approach at the core of DIST, the approach is designed to be extensible and allow for community expansion and improvement.

Our vision and why this project exists

Organisations can measure the carbon footprints of their technology with increasing confidence, but carbon is only one dimension of technology’s impact on the world. Water consumption, electronic waste, biodiversity loss, supply chain conditions, and the societal and individual harms caused by technology systems are all material impacts. Today there is no consistent, open, structured way for organisations to report on or share data about these impacts alongside their carbon data. Our vision is an open-source schema and taxonomy that enables any organisation to understand and report on the full spectrum of their technology estate’s impacts in a consistent, machine-readable, and comparable format. A shared language for digital impacts that is:

• Practical enough for a mid-sized organisation 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

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

The problem(s) we are solving

1. There is no shared structure / schema / taxonomy for reporting technology impacts including but also beyond carbon. Organisations 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 organisation 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 organisations 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. As GWF’s own case study with TCS noted: there’s a risk that digital sustainability becomes synonymous with green coding and energy efficiency. These matter, but they are not enough. The Digital Tech Industry Doughnut Flower showed that 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. Organisations 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.