The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), through its United for Efficiency (U4E) initiative, has published the Sustainable Procurement Guidelines for Data Centres and Servers (the Guidelines). It aims to help governments, public institutions, and procurement authorities ensure that data centre infrastructure is more energy and resource efficient.
The Guidelines provide measurable technical criteria and best practices to bridge the regulatory gap, where rapid expansion of data centres is happening without strong sustainability safeguards. These include i) performance criteria including power and water usage effectiveness, server efficiency, power supply efficiency and idle state efficiency, as well as ii) operating conditionsincluding location, renewable energy factor, cooling design, temperature and humidity range.
These Guidelines are necessary because data centres are extremely energy and water intensive. Their growth which is fueled by rising digital demand, AI, cloud computing, and data sovereignty goals, could lead to elevated carbon footprint, energy costs and increased stress on water resources. By considering sustainability in procurement processes, institutions can drive digital transformation toward cleaner technologies and practices such as energy-efficient servers and climate-friendly data centres.
The full Guidelines may be accessed here.
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