In October 2025, we released a new tool to help you understand the environmental impact of operating digital services — computers, servers, monitors, mobile devices, and network devices. The plugin Carbon, available to everyone via the GLPI Marketplace and our project's GitHub, will outline the carbon footprint of your company's digital assets.
Everybody has an important role to play in reducing carbon impact and reversing climate change. This project, coordinated by IRT SystemX in partnership with Teclib', and other organizations within the IEN initiative, started with a fundamental question: how do you actually measure the impact digital services have on climate change?
The impact of running digital services and assets
At a high level, powering hardware uses energy. Producing that energy involve emitting carbon into the atmosphere — contributing to climate change.
When you use digital services, whether on cloud infrastructure or on-premises, energy is consumed to deliver the tools you rely on daily. And energy is not the only resource consumed to deliver digital services worldwide.
Understanding the impact of digital tools involves measuring indirect emissions, primarily from Scope 2 (energy consumed during operation) and Scope 3 (everything else — from manufacturing to logistics). Did you know that Scope 3 alone accounts for more than 70% of total carbon footprint for most organizations?
But here's the problem most teams run into: where does that data actually come from?
Two data sources working together
Measuring carbon emissions from digital assets requires two distinct types of external data.
The first is the carbon intensity of the electricity grid. The carbon cost of powering a device in São Paulo is different from powering the same device in Tokyo or Paris — because the energy mix varies. In Brazil, hydroelectric power makes up a large share of the grid; in Germany, coal still plays a role. The Carbon plugin integrates with Electricity Maps, a real-time platform that tracks where the world's electricity comes from and how much CO2 is emitted to produce it, per region, per hour.
The second is the environmental cost of manufacturing those assets. A server doesn't become a server for free — extracting the raw materials, assembling the components, and transporting the finished product all emit carbon before the device ever gets plugged in. For this, the plugin uses Boavizta API, maintained by a French non-profit dedicated to Green IT. Boavizta provides carbon footprint data from asset fabrication and transport, and goes beyond greenhouse gas emissions to also account for abiotic resource depletion and primary energy consumption.
GLPI already holds the asset data, so Carbon can connect those assets to these two external sources to produce meaningful, localized estimates.
Calculating the carbon emissions of your fleet
Most of the carbon associated with digital assets doesn't come from running them — it comes from making them. This is what the plugin calls embodied carbon, and it will likely be the dominant figure you see when you first configure Carbon for your fleet.
To generate accurate estimates, each asset needs a few pieces of information set correctly in GLPI:
- A location with a country or state filled (so Electricity Maps can return the right grid intensity)
- A usage profile defined in the Carbon plugin tab
- A model or type with power consumption filled in
- Financial information with a start, delivery, or order date
Once those are in place, GLPI calculates and displays the environmental footprint per device — and aggregates it into a fleet-wide report under Tools > Carbon Reports.
The report covers CO2 equivalent emissions from energy consumed during operation, embodied carbon from manufacturing, primary energy consumption, and abiotic depletion potential (measured in Antimony equivalent). A breakdown by asset model helps teams identify which devices are the largest contributors, and a chart visualizes the relationship between energy consumed and carbon emitted.
What's next
The plugin is actively maintained by Teclib', and no subscription is required to use it — though external data providers like Electricity Maps may have fees depending on your region and usage tier.
The upcoming 1.2.0 release already has a beta available, and it brings significant improvements: support for 20 environmental impact criteria through Boavizta API, the ability to manually input impact data for device models with source and data quality indicators, support for paid Electricity Maps subscriptions, and the option to exclude specific device types from calculations.
Looking further ahead, the roadmap includes support for cloud infrastructure measurement, annualized impact data based on estimated equipment lifespan, and — most importantly — tools aimed at supporting actual decision-making, not just reporting.
The goal of Carbon is to give IT teams and decision-makers a clear view of where their environmental footprint comes from, so they can act on it.
If you've already installed the plugin, the team is actively looking for feedback on migration from older versions, bug reports, and most of all: which data points are most useful to you. That input will shape where the reports go next.
