In collaboration with Gofore Plc and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), NIIS assessed the environmental footprint of the X-Road ecosystem solution, in order to reduce its CO2 emissions and make it the most sustainable data-exchange solution in the world.
The X-Road® initiative represents a global success for the open source community. Revolving around the concept of interoperability, it is an open-source software and ecosystem solution that provides unified and secure data exchange between several organisations around the world. At the beginning of 2021, the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS), which is the organisation responsible for its development and maintenance, put sustainability at the top of its agenda. Given the worldwide success of the X-Road initiative, NIIS decided to enlarge the scope of the solution to take into account sustainability, with particular reference to both the sustainable development goals (SDGs) outlined in the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the climate goals set up in the Paris Agreement.
“Understanding and measuring X-Road’s current environmental impact is the first step in the path of making X-Road the most sustainable data-exchange solution in the world. Understanding the factors that affect environmental sustainability enables us to concentrate on improving the most impactful areas and measure the effects of the concrete changes that we implement”, said Petteri Kivimäki, CTO of NIIS.
So far, sustainability has not been the main focus at the core of the X-Road development. This is why the Institute decided, first of all, to kick off a study in order to understand the environmental footprint of the solution and suggest recommendations aimed to reduce it. Named “X-Road Emissions Calculator”, this project was formally launched at the end of January with Gofore Plc and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI). The first phase lasted from February to mid-April, and it entailed the scope definition of the environmental impacts to include as well as the setup of the methodology used, all drafted in the first report.
At this stage, it has been decided to gather and analyse data only from instances in Estonia and Finland. However, this model can be globally applied to any other X-Road instance. What is more, the team mapped the X-Road’s potential sources of CO2 emissions (CO2e), and selected three main ones: infrastructure, data transaction and data storage. As for the physical infrastructure, the study only accounted for the Security Server, as it is the main component to process data and enable secure data exchange. The transaction and storage of data have been treated as separate elements, being the first calculated as the “product of the total amount of data exchanged over X-Road and the electricity consumption per GB of data transferred” and the second as the sum of both the hard disk drives’ start-up power and the power consumption during data writing as well as in idle and standby mode.
In mid-April, the study team published the results on the total CO2e of the instances considered. As it turns out, the primary source of CO2e has been detected in the physical infrastructure of X-Road (i.e. the Security Servers). Specifically, emissions from servers account for nearly 96% of the total CO2e considered in the study. What is more, the Estonian infrastructure roughly more than doubles the emissions in Finland, which is explained by the current disparity in the electricity emission factor (i.e. 0.723 kg of CO2e/kWh for Estonia and 0.136 kg of CO2e/kWh for Finland). In fact, even though in Finland there are 290 Security Servers and in Estonia 173, the emissions generated by the Estonian instance are bigger because of the emission factor. As far as data transaction and data storage are concerned, they respectively generate less than 1% and around 3% of the overall amount.
Now that the environmental footprint of X-Road has been assessed, the next phase of the project can start. Particularly, it will relate to the feedback gathering on the methodology and the publication of a final report, which will include both the aforementioned results as well as the set of recommendations for the emissions’ reduction.