Crawl, Cloud, Carbon: Measuring and Reducing Emissions for Web Archivists
This presentation presents a method for estimating carbon emissions from cloud computing through a web archiving case study. It explains how emissions arise across cloud infrastructure and why web archiving is especially carbon-intensive. The method estimates emissions using hardware power use, processor utilisation, grid carbon intensity, transmission losses, and lifecycle impacts. Case study results demonstrate its accuracy and suggest improvements. The presentation ends with recommendations such as using low-carbon datacentres and more efficient software. Presented at the IIPC General Assembly and Web Archiving Conference held on April 20-23, 2026 in Brusells, Belgium.