Measuring the carbon footprint of IT services
For a long time, carbon measurement seemed like a problem for large corporate clients — the organisations subject to CSRD reporting, required to publish their GHG inventories under the ESRS framework.
IT service providers could reasonably assume they sat outside that obligation. That assumption no longer holds.
Here is why — and how to turn it into an advantage.
In this Article
The regulatory and commercial case — in three parts
The essentials at a glance
Regulatory pressure
CSRD requires large organisations to report Scope 3 emissions — which means their IT service providers are now directly in scope.
Commercial opportunity
Measuring the carbon footprint of IT projects is a competitive differentiator that few providers have yet structured — and a powerful client retention tool.
Where to start
Map your service categories, instrument project-level data collection, then deliver client-ready outputs that slot directly into their CSRD reporting.
Part 1
Regulatory pressure is flowing down to IT service providers
CSRD doesn't stop at your client's front door
CSRD requires in-scope organisations to cover Scope 3 emissions — specifically Category 1 (purchased goods and services) and Category 11 (use of sold products and services).
IT services — software development, managed services, digital transformation consulting, systems integration — represent a significant and growing share of indirect procurement spend at large enterprises.
As a result, sustainability and procurement teams are turning to their IT suppliers and demanding reliable, traceable — ideally certified — emissions data.
The consequence is straightforward: an IT service provider that cannot measure the carbon footprint of its deliverables will increasingly find itself excluded from preferred supplier panels or marked down in tender evaluations.
This is no longer a forecast. It has been observable in enterprise procurement processes across industrial, financial, and public sector clients since 2024.
What about the European Omnibus adjustment?
The European Omnibus package has narrowed the CSRD scope to companies with 1,000+ employees and €450M+ in turnover.
This does not reduce the pressure on IT providers — it concentrates it on the largest, most commercially significant clients, whose contractual requirements carry the most weight.
GHG Protocol Scope 3 Category 1 (purchased goods and services) requires CSRD-obligated companies to account for emissions generated by their suppliers — including IT service providers.
This brings IT firms directly into their clients’ mandatory reporting perimeter.
Part 2
A commercial differentiator that most IT providers have yet to seize
Turn a compliance burden into a competitive advantage
Beyond compliance, project-level carbon measurement opens up a genuine competitive advantage — and the window is still open, because very few IT providers have structured this capability.
Client demand exists, but it is still scattered. Sustainability teams are pushing, procurement is adding ESG criteria to supplier scoring frameworks, and CIOs are being given digital carbon reduction targets of their own.
What clients are actually looking for is a partner who can deliver project-by-project emissions data that plugs directly into their own reporting — not a generic sustainability policy statement from their supplier’s website.
Three concrete differentiators
- A project carbon assessment at the start of each engagement
- A reduction roadmap embedded in contract governance
- A certified impact report delivered at project close
This also creates a powerful retention dynamic. In a market where clients are rationalising their supplier panels, the IT provider that actively contributes to a client’s CSRD objectives builds a dependency that is genuinely difficult for a competitor without that capability to displace.
Three differentiators
A project carbon assessment at the start of each engagement · A reduction roadmap embedded in contract governance · A certified impact report delivered at project close
Part 3
Where to start: a pragmatic three-step approach
You don't need to build a carbon methodology from scratch
Established frameworks already exist — the GHG Protocol, the ADEME Bilan Carbone® — and specialist platforms can automate the collection and calculation of emission factors by asset type, service category, or infrastructure.
The path forward breaks down into three steps:
Step 1 - Map your service categories
Not all engagements are measured the same way. On-site staff augmentation, cloud-native development, physical infrastructure managed services — each category has its own primary emission drivers: hardware, energy, travel, software usage.
The first step is segmenting your service catalogue to identify the right measurement perimeters for each type of work.
Step 2 - Instrument data collection at project level
The operational challenge: how do you collect the necessary data — electricity consumption, equipment utilisation rates, hosting, travel — without creating meaningful overhead for project managers?
The answer lies in integrating with existing tooling (ITSM, CMDB, project management platforms) and deploying a platform that can aggregate and automatically calculate emission factors across the portfolio.
Step 3 - Deliver client-ready outputs
A project carbon report only has commercial value if it is readable, certifiable, and exportable in the formats that client sustainability teams actually need — iXBRL, CSRD-compatible reports.
The end goal: handing every client a structured impact document at project close that they can plug directly into their Scope 3 reporting.
Measuring the carbon impact of IT services is no longer a peripheral sustainability topic for IT providers — it is a growing condition of market access, and a competitive differentiator that most have yet to act on.
Those who move now build a durable advantage.
Those who wait will absorb the pressure without capturing any of the upside.
FAQ
Not necessarily on a direct basis — unless they exceed CSRD thresholds themselves. But they are indirectly obligated: their CSRD-subject clients must include supplier emissions in their Scope 3 reporting, which creates a de facto requirement to provide reliable carbon data — regardless of the provider’s own regulatory status.
A project carbon report quantifies the greenhouse gas emissions generated by a specific IT engagement — covering hardware used, energy consumption, travel, and hosting. It is structured to integrate directly into the client’s Scope 3 reporting, in formats compatible with CSRD requirements.
The two primary frameworks are the GHG Protocol (Scope 1, 2, and 3) and the ADEME Bilan Carbone®. For IT-specific granularity, the GR491 framework and GreenIT.fr guidelines add detailed coverage of digital assets, usage patterns, and infrastructure.
Because their CSRD-obligated clients must include IT supplier emissions in their Scope 3 reporting. A provider that cannot supply this data risks being removed from preferred supplier panels or losing marks in tender evaluations — a pattern already visible in large enterprise procurement across industrial, financial, and public sector clients since 2024.
Scope 3 Category 1 covers emissions from purchased goods and services. For a large enterprise, IT services outsourced to providers — development, managed services, consulting — fall into this category and must be included in their GHG inventory. IT providers are therefore contributing to their clients’ mandatory reporting whether they measure it or not.
By delivering concrete outputs at each stage of an engagement: a carbon assessment at kick-off, a reduction roadmap embedded in contract governance, and a certified impact report at close. These elements differentiate the provider in competitive bids and deepen retention with clients who face CSRD obligations.
No. The Omnibus narrows the CSRD scope to companies with 1,000+ employees and €450M+ turnover — which are precisely the most strategically important clients for IT service providers. Their contractual requirements around supplier carbon data remain fully intact.
Client story
In this on-demand webinar, Arkema shares how they moved from manual Excel-based reporting to a scalable, industrialised IT sustainability approach — deployed across 25 countries with Verdikt.