5.1 Have an ethical and sustainable product strategy
Success Criterion
Develop, publish and maintain key policies, such as a code of ethics, product guidelines, sustainability statements, and/or other documents that include language specific to digital products, services, policies, and programs. Address public concerns around AI and relevant emerging technologies with public-facing policies. Make these publicly accessible and transparently versioned formats
Publish achievements, features, compliance, and anything beyond the scope of these guidelines within a dedicated sustainability section.
Provide evidence to demonstrate how digital sustainability policies, climate policies, and related practices are effectively implemented, monitored, and governed over time.
Advocate for and comply with responsible legislation that supports employment rights, transparency, and accountability related to sharing economic benefits, along with policies that impact your organization in relation to emerging technologies and/or digital sustainability.
GRI High High High High
5.2 Assign a sustainability advocate
Success Criterion
Assign a sustainability advocate with specific digital expertise and provide them with the resources, budget, tools, and time they need to achieve their stated goals. In some organizations, expanding this into a climate working group comprising motivated individuals can add further benefits.
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.3 Inform, raise awareness, and train for sustainability
Success Criterion
Produce, provide, and/or facilitate the delivery of onboarding materials and workshops to everyone connected to your project. This includes team members, contributors, colleagues, and organizational decision-makers - both within and external to the organization - to properly educate all regarding general and digital climate literacy, as well as your own sustainable technology policies.
Provide active and routine training where possible to develop, establish, and refresh skills relating to sustainability. This can be delivered as in-house training, courses, workshops, events, webinars, meetups, or other ongoing or on-demand methods that support your team in achieving sustainability objectives.
Encourage participants to reduce their environmental impact. Share climate and sustainable initiatives and ideas. Provide resources on sustainable design, best practices, and concepts to assist them.
Create and/or deliver dedicated training manuals, workshops, and materials to outline the sustainability policies and practices adopted and how to implement them. Manage and maintain these materials over time, adapting them as new policies and best practices arise.
Incentivize leadership, teams, and individuals to make progress toward the goals outlined in their training. Examples include dedicating time for sustainability-related activities, recognizing completion, and other benefits.
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.4 Communicate the environmental impact of user choices
Success Criterion
Clearly communicate the environmental impact of different user choices and allow users to configure settings based on the information provided.
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.5 Calculate the environmental impact
Success Criterion
Conduct a life-cycle analysis/assessment (LCA ) to define sustainability-related functional unit impacts throughout a project's lifetime.
Calculate the environmental impact of your project compared to that of market alternatives to inform decision-making targets. Establish the need for your product by comparing the value offered by your project compared to these same alternatives.
Include the impact or estimated impact of any tooling or third-party solutions used at any stage in your pipeline. While not created by you, the emissions generated in production, maintenance, and use are also integral to your overall solution.
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.6 Define clear organizational sustainability goals and metrics
Success Criterion
Define and publish a clear set of sustainability goals. Publicly communicate how these goals can be met, including which performance metrics can be measured to help the organization and its various affected parties act more sustainably.
GRI Low Low Low Low
5.7 Validate efforts using established third-party certifications
Success Criterion
Obtain one or more sustainability certifications and incorporate operational policies and practices in alignment with their guidance.
Maintains sustainability certifications through continuing to meet their criteria and evolving policies and practices over time.
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.8 Support mandatory disclosures and reporting
Success Criterion
Create and publish policies and practices to disclose the social and environmental impacts of its products, programs, and services in line with existing reporting standards such as GRI, SASB , etc.
Produce a publicly available impact report outlining progress compared to previous reports on social and environmental goals at least once per year.
Publicly and transparently demonstrate commitment over time to following and adopting existing and/or emerging environmental standards and legislative policy that promotes mandatory emissions disclosures and reporting.
Clearly identify how environmental impact is being reduced, with careful avoidance of double accounting, greenwashing, data exclusion, or other misleading or manipulative techniques.
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.9 Create one or more impact business models
Success Criterion
Complete and operationalize a theory of change process with requisite documentation to identify the impact the organization aspires to achieve, how it will generate revenue, how it will create shared or added value from these activities, and how it will measure results based on desired outcomes. In the case of projects already underway, how these are generating revenue and actively tracking and measuring progress against desired outcomes.
GRI High High High High
5.10 Follow a product management and maintenance strategy
Success Criterion
Produce and maintain documentation to outline how the organization approaches product management and maintenance.
Establish maintenance and security plans for all digital products and services.
Ensure that products, prototypes, testing, and supporting processes are sufficiently resourced over time - including staffing and budgeting - so that teams can maintain capacity, address technical debt, refactor code, introduce new features, support long-term care and maintenance, and avoid project abandonment for customers, users, and all affected parties.
Incorporate carbon and resource measurement into maintenance programs and show measurable improvement over time.
Identify and document Key Failure Indicators (KFIs ) and implement resolutions to prevent negative sustainability impacts.
GRI High High High High
5.11 Implement continuous improvement procedures
Success Criterion
Establish policies and practices to enable continuous improvement and resource practices appropriately to support these efforts over time.
Review deliverables and update frequency to ensure project teams have enough time to conduct user research, identify technical debt, and produce high-quality output as well as share what they learned.
Display a track record of continuous improvement (iteration) processes to analyze the digital product or service. Simultaneously address any potential consequences of ongoing experimentation, such as technical debt, product performance, and emissions. Analytics are limited to strictly necessary features that aid decision-making, encouraging user feedback, and comparing performance against organization goals and user needs.
Justify and prioritize the retention of existing features, the creation of new functionality, and the decommissioning or elimination of unused functionality or low-traffic content throughout the product's life cycle on a case-by-case basis.
Provide corrective security and policy updates during the product or service life cycle. These should be distinguished from more extensive evolutionary updates.
Develop sustainable product and data strategies using appropriate training techniques. These should help your team build capacity and learn new skills to manage and maintain products and services over time.
GRI High High High High
5.12 Document future updates and evolutions
Success Criterion
When a feature is added, updated, or removed to improve user experience, clear documentation of the changes is provided in a well structured, semantically versioned document.
GRI Low Low Low Low
5.13 Establish if a digital product or service is necessary
Success Criterion
Identify where the product or service aligns with one of the UN (SDGs) and its appropriate targets within a sustainability statement.
Determine that the product or service is necessary based upon desirability, feasibility, and viability factors.
Remove or alleviate any obstacles to using a product or service, such as accessibility, equality, technical, or territorial.
GRI High High High High
5.14 Provide a supplier standards of practice document
Success Criterion
Create specific policies to vet potential partners along the supply chain based on sustainability principles.
Partner with suppliers to create, track and measure impact on issues that impact affected parties.
Promote and disclose partnerships in a publicly available place, along with information on how the partnership creates a collective impact.
GRI High High High High
5.15 Share economic benefits
Success Criterion
Publicly commit to paying employees, contractors, and other affected parties a living wage.
Have policies and practices to incentivize affected parties, such as workers and contractors, to meet impact goals.
Provide benefits to employees in accordance with resources, including, where relevant, healthcare, retirement planning, flex time, profit sharing, and more.
GRI High High High High
5.16 Share decision-making power with affected parties
Success Criterion
Assign all affected parties, from users to project managers, an equitable role in the decision-making process. Ensure all internal involved parties have the necessary power and autonomy to make key decisions on the organization's behalf. Where an autonomous system is able to make automated decisions, it must be possible to opt out, object, withdraw, and restrict the use of personal data. Any autonomous process must also be made as transparent as possible with evidence-based assurances that the metrics used are not biased. Affected parties must be able to obtain details about how the decision was made and offered a means to challenge decisions with human oversight.
GRI Low Low Low Low
5.17 Use Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion (JEDI ) practices
Success Criterion
Document commitments to JEDI practices with clear policies on how marginalized or otherwise underserved communities are prioritized.
Establish a publicly displayed accessibility policy and demonstrate this via accessible digital products or services.
Provide JEDI-related training materials and schedule regular workshops related to how this topic manifests itself in digital products and services, covering topics such as algorithmic bias, digital divide, employment, mis- and disinformation.
Show measurable improvement over time across hiring, leadership, and operations.
GRI High High High High
5.18 Promote responsible data practices
Success Criterion
Maintain a publicly accessible privacy policy, terms and conditions, and any other documents as required by law in the jurisdictions in which the product or service operates. Adhere to the most restrictive data protection regulations, especially when providing services outside the organization's country. Provide documents in accessible formats and use clear, user-friendly language to ensure comprehension by all users. Avoid unnecessary jargon, technical language, and legalese. Support emerging legislation and implement best practices related to data privacy, sustainability, and responsible data management.
Demonstrate measurable progress over time in regard to respecting data privacy and ownership. Specify how opt-out will be handled along with ownership rights. Data deletion or "Right to be forgotten" requests must immediately propagate to databases and local caches. Cached data must not persist after a user has revoked consent or deleted their account. Also provide the ability to download or export data created by or in relation to the user in a non-proprietary format.
GRI High High High High
5.19 Implement appropriate data management procedures
Success Criterion
Archive and delete outdated or otherwise expired product content and data via automated expiration dates and scheduled product audits. Publish the archiving schedule, ensuring a lightweight version of the old searchable content is maintained for those that may require it.
Allow users to control, manage, and delete their data, subscriptions, and accounts.
GRI Low Low Low Low
5.20 Establish responsible practices around AI and emerging or disruptive technologies
Success Criterion
Ensure all technologies that deploy or create large datasets use data that is appropriately scaled and stored, ethically sourced, screened, validated, and implemented in a non-discriminatory, responsible manner.
Show how members of your organization are supported in the process of adapting to the rise of new technologies that could disrupt the organization's business model or operational norms.
Audit and account for any environmental considerations associated with the promotion or adoption of AI or any emerging or disruptive technologies. This should include third-party choices, and the associated waste or emissions per use and those incurred as a consequence of deployment.
Ensure all automated tooling, scrapers, spiders, bots, artificial intelligence, and other forms of machine-assisted data gathering abides by requests to opt out at the host, server, or website level. Providers must declare themselves as non-human within the user-agent/HTTP header. Providers must also publish impact reports relating to their gathering activities.
Do not roll out post-quantum encryption for high-traffic services that do not need resilience against harvest now, decrypt later attacks, where attackers steal encrypted data, anticipating that future quantum computers will be powerful enough to break the encryption and make the data readable at a later date.
GRI High High High High
5.21 Include responsible financial policies
Success Criterion
Divest from fossil fuels and move banking, sponsorship, and other affiliations to more responsible partners.
Engage in flexible financing and responsible budgeting to accommodate long-term care and maintenance.
GRI High High High High
5.22 Include organizational philanthropy policies
Success Criterion
Establish a clear corporate giving policy and create philanthropic partnerships with strategically aligned organizations.
Engage in free or volunteer projects to help teams learn new tools and tactics, while also helping charities and non-profit organizations to build capacity.
GRI High High High High
5.23 Plan for a digital product or service's care and end-of-life
Success Criterion
Provide clear, documented end-of-life guidelines that include data disposal, archiving, file deletion, and other relevant guidance.
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.24 Include e-waste, right to repair, and recycling policies
Success Criterion
Responsibly recycle or upcycle unwanted hardware or materials. Materials should be recovered, redeployment, and reused, where possible, or otherwise disposed of sustainably. Service providers should have a policy for responsible e-waste management.
Establish specific policies around e-waste recycling and repair owned technology products whenever possible.
Form relationships with local partners for e-waste recycling and repair.
Buy refurbished equipment whenever possible.
Allow consumers to repair the consumables they purchase to the best of their ability, offering replacement components if possible at cost, and provide clear instructions to help resolve faults that occur.
GRI High High High High
5.25 Define performance and environmental budgets
Success Criterion
Define and document clear digital sustainability budget criteria that covers impact from asset and resource creation to consumption. Communicate this to affected parties.
Use a performance budget to set a target maximum size of your digital product or service to monitor and reduce impact of data transfer, file type size, and more.
Define KPIs around engineering hours, development time, or sprints while keeping the health and well-being of your workers paramount. Sustainably optimize workflows to allow all tasks to be performed with care.
Establish a baseline and measurement criteria to track improvements over time. Improvement claims must be evidenced and verifiable.
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.26 Use open source where possible
Success Criterion
Establish a clear open source policy that outlines how open-source tools are used and any practices used to support open-source development.
Show a track record of collaboration and building communities around open-source principles.
Contribute regularly in terms of code, human-time, and/or financially, to open-source community-based projects.
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.27 Create a business continuity and disaster recovery plan
Success Criterion
Create, regularly review, and occasionally test a plan of action to determine readiness in case of an incident and establish procedures to quickly recover from any incident.
Maintain regular and transparent communication with the audience regarding issues that may affect service delivery or user data.
GRI Low Low Low Low