Software is where most IT energy is spent, yet it is the part of the footprint companies report by estimate. GreenCode is building measured, auditable evidence that stands up in CSRD and ESRS disclosures.
If your organisation reports under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the electricity used by your software already sits inside the numbers you sign off. Servers you run yourself fall under Scope 2. Cloud and SaaS services fall under Scope 3, category 1 (purchased goods and services), and leased data-centre capacity under category 8 (upstream leased assets). ESRS E1 asks for all three scopes and for the reduction targets behind them.
View full sizeThe problem is the quality of the evidence. Most organisations know their IT emissions only as a line on a supplier's carbon statement or a spend-based estimate. They cannot say which applications drive the total. GreenCode's state of the art review records the same gap: CSRD mandates disclosure of IT usage impacts, but there is no software-specific methodology behind it.
The 2025 omnibus package changed who has to report, not what good reporting looks like. The Commission's February 2025 proposal limited the directive to companies with more than 1,000 employees, removing around 80 per cent of companies from scope by its own estimate, and the "stop-the-clock" directive of April 2025 delayed the second and third waves by two years. Large companies remain in scope, their suppliers are still asked for data, and public-sector buyers ask for the same evidence.
GreenCode treats energy as a measured property of software, like test coverage or response time. Its pipeline takes a codebase, reconstructs a representative version of its infrastructure, benchmarks it under load, and records energy use before and after each optimisation. Each measurement is tied to a specific version, configuration and test run, so a reported number can be traced back to what produced it.
The review found that even where energy is measured today, results are rarely in a form suitable for assurance, certification or comparable procurement claims. The project's preliminary requirements make the fix a top-priority deliverable (FR21): a certification-ready evidence bundle containing measurement boundaries, assumptions, allocation rules, tool versions, diffs and test results, with a human-readable report of what was changed and what it saved (FR22).
The underlying Software Carbon Intensity specification is now ISO/IEC 21031:2024 and aligns with the GHG Protocol and ISO 14064, so it fits inside a corporate inventory.
Software-level measurement can produce activity data, in kilowatt hours, for a defined workload on defined hardware, and show that a change reduced that figure. On your own servers that feeds Scope 2 directly. It can rank applications so that reduction effort goes where the energy is.
It cannot replace the emission factors your cloud provider publishes, because hardware counters are not exposed in public cloud and any per-service figure there is an estimate. The review is candid that the SCI specification is weak on multi-tenant allocation and that results depend heavily on allocation choices. GreenCode's response is to state the allocation rule and attach a confidence grade rather than hide it. Measurement does not cover embodied carbon in hardware and does not replace an auditor's assurance. What it does is turn a Scope 2 and Scope 3 estimate into a figure with a method behind it.
Software emissions become a managed line rather than an inherited one, with a baseline and a measured trend. Reduction claims in a CSRD report or a tender response are backed by a reproducible test rather than a supplier's average. The same evidence tells the engineering team where the energy is being spent. GreenCode runs to 2027 and this tooling is being built and validated on partner use cases now.
Measurement and CO2e estimation sit in the green DevOps and infrastructure assessment work package, which includes infrastructure energy monitoring. Benchmarking and the certification stage that produces the rating and evidence bundle sit in the processing pipeline and benchmarking work package, which also contributes to the Green Software Foundation's open-source rating work. The dissemination and standardisation work package carries the standardisation work.
Organisations that want to take part or trial the measurement and reporting tools can reach the project through the contact page.
