The Government Digital Service (GDS) is working on a roadmap to reduce carbon emissions from the use of the One Login service.
Its director of digital identity, Natalie Jones, said it has already developed a baseline and is now considering ways to monitor and manage the emissions.
GDS has been developing One Login as a single form on online identity verification for central government services, and it has begun to attract take-up by a number of departments and agencies.
Writing in a blogpost, Jones said one of the aims is to make it one of the most environmentally sustainable digital services in government.
GDS has developed a baseline from the page weights and app sizes of One Login – which are relatively low in comparison to other services – and is starting to build a roadmap of activities to reduce carbon emissions, and put in place better monitoring tools.
Among the possibilities under consideration are to host assets such as images and fonts on a shared domain so the user only has to download them once, and minimising data storage by removing some unused cloud assets and implementing better data classification.
Increase expected
Jones said that One Login’s annual emissions are currently around 200 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, but this is expected to increase into the thousands as it is more widely used.
“Next we’re rolling onto our neighbours in GOV.UK to run a similar exercise on GOV.UK (the web publishing platform for central government) itself,” she said, adding:
“In GOV.UK One Login we have the glimmer of an idea that in order to do this teams will need a set of simple tools and processes they can apply and as we collaborate with GOV.UK teams on calculating their footprint we’ll be adding to our lessons learned around how to measure things effectively and efficiently.”
