Combating climate change is a high priority worldwide. The European Green Deal is the strategy with which the EU aims to achieve its climate target for 2050. In this context, the areas of environment and energy are of great importance. Among other things, the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) was issued to implement the Green Deal plans.

To implement this directive, data center operators have joined forces and launched a self-regulation initiative. The goal is to make the data center industry climate neutral by 2030. The climate neutral data center pact (CNDCP) was introduced for the purpose of implementation. Here, the players in cloud infrastructure services and data centers commit to taking various measures to make data centers climate neutral. The focus of the initiative is on energy efficiency, the use of “green” energy, minimizing water consumption and waste heat recovery.

This white paper provides an overview of the current instruments and standards on the topic of “sustainability, resource and energy efficiency” with a view from the data center operations.