There is a question we should ask ourselves whenever we talk about digital sustainability: how do we know if a digital project is truly sustainable?
Not in the rhetorical sense of the term but in the real and concrete sense: by what metrics do we measure it? Who verifies it? How do we compare it with another project? Perhaps in another company or another country? Without an answer to these questions, digital sustainability risks remaining a tool for greenwashing. The answer? Using technical standardisation…
The double face of digital
The digital has a double face that is not always in focus: behind every connection, every algorithm, every digital service, there are two opposing realities.
– On the one hand, digital consumes: data centres, networks, devices, generative AI models require huge amounts of energy, water, critical raw materials. It is estimated that training a large language model can emit as much as five petrol-powered cars over their entire lifetime. This is not a minor detail: it is a systemic and growing impact.
– On the other hand, it enables: it optimises industrial processes, reduces waste, supports decisions for the twin transition. We can say that digital is one of the most powerful tools we have to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda.
The critical point: without shared metrics and verifiable processes, we cannot distinguish those who really make a difference from those who only produce digital greenwashing. And this is where technical standardisation comes in to help make digital sustainability possible.
International and European Working Groups
At international level, the two technical reference committees in ISO/IEC JTC 1 ‘Information Technology’ are SC 42 and SC 39, with complementary perimeters.
– ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 42 ‘AI‘ publishedISO/IEC TR 20226:2025 ‘Environmental Sustainability Aspects of AI Systems’. It is the first organic framework for measuring and mitigating the environmental impacts of AI systems throughout their life cycle. The document introduces operational strategies such as ‘carbon-aware scheduling’ and ‘federated learning’ and addresses concrete aspects such as energy consumption in the training and inference phases, water footprint of data centres, carbon emissions, material impact, and end-of-life.
–ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 39 ‘Sustainability, IT and Data Centres’ works on the sustainability of the digital infrastructure as a whole: assessment methods, design, operation and management practices for resource efficiency and environmental resilience of IT and data centres. It has just published ISO/IEC TS 20125-1:2026 ‘Digital Services Ecodesign’, which defines ecodesign principles for digital services throughout their life cycle.
The two committees work together because the data centres that host AI systems and the environmental metrics of AI itself are two sides of the same coin.
At the European level, the point of reference for AI is CEN/CENELEC JTC 21, which has been mandated by the European Commission since 2023 to develop harmonised standards to support the AI Act.
JTC 21 adopts and adapts the international standards of SC 42 to the European context and develops specific harmonised standards related to the obligations of the regulation. On the sustainability front, it has already published CEN/CLC/TR 18145:2025 ‘Green and Sustainable AI’, with guidelines on energy efficiency, resource optimisation and minimising the life-cycle impact of AI systems. A project on ‘Sustainable AI Guidelines and Metrics’ is also underway, with specific components on energy consumption measurement methodologies, carbon footprint calculation and reporting frameworks.
The role of Italy: UNINFO and national commissions
Italy actively participates in all these tables through UNINFO, the UNI Federated Body with delegated authority for the standardisation of information technologies and their applications.
On the AI front, the UNI/CT 533 ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is the national commission that manages Italian participation in ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 42 and CEN/CENELEC JTC 21. It is the place where the Italian position is formed, technical consensus is built, and the instances of the country-system are brought to international and European tables.
On the sustainable digital infrastructure front, UNI/CT 519 ‘Enabling Technologies for the Digitisation and Sustainability of Business Processes’ covers the activities of ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 39 and twin transition issues. It is the link between the sustainability of AI and the sustainability of the infrastructure that hosts it.
The operational tools: UNI/PdR 147 and UNI/PdR 187
International and European work needs national operational tools that translate it into the daily practice of organisations. The Foundation for Digital Sustainability has developed with UNINFO and UNI two reference practices that perform exactly this function.
– UNI/PdR 147:2025 ‘Digital Sustainability: Requirements and Indicators for Innovation Processes’ defines 50 KPIs distributed along the entire life cycle of digital projects, with a five-level maturity metric inspired by the Capability Maturity Model. The strategic novelty of the 2025 version is the explicit link with the ESRS (European Sustainability Reporting Standards): organisations subject to CSRD obligations can use the practice as an operational tool for their ESG disclosure related to digital projects. The introduction of third-party certification completes the transformation from a self-assessment tool to a framework verifiable by accredited bodies.
– UNI/PdR 187:2026 “Digital sustainability of communication and advertising” extends the scope to digital communication, defining the requirements that communication strategies, practices and projects must comply with in order to align with the 17 SDGs of Agenda 2030. It articulates KPIs on the strategic, infrastructural, technological, organisational and content components of communication, focusing on the interaction between digital tools, messages, channels and recipients. It applies to the entire life cycle of communication initiatives: from defining strategies, to designing campaigns, to monitoring impacts from an environmental, social, economic and cultural perspective.
Together, the two practices cover two fundamental pillars of digital sustainability: transformation processes and communication, making both measurable, verifiable and certifiable.
Conclusion: standardisation as an infrastructure of sustainability
Technical standardisation does not end up in the newspapers. It does not generate headlines. It serves to make information about the digital sustainability of data centres and AI systems certain and verifiable. It is that invisible infrastructure that makes possible any effective public policy, any transparent market, any sustainability statement that wants to be taken seriously.
The tables of ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 42, ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 39 and CEN/CENELEC JTC 21, together with the national committees UNI/CT 533 and UNI/CT 519 are building the shared foundations on which the digital sustainability of the coming years will rest.
The UNI/PdR 147 and UNI/PdR 187 practices bring them into Italian organisations, making them operational today.
It is important that in this process there is the active contribution of businesses, universities and public administration. For this reason, the role of UNINFO, which collects the instances of the country-system and brings them to international and European tables, is central; as is that of the Foundation for Digital Sustainability, a point of reference for digital sustainability in Italy and UNINFO Honorary Member, which translates regulatory work into concrete operational tools for organisations.
Participating in national technical committees, adopting available reference practices and helping to write the rules of the digital sustainability game is a collective responsibility that cannot go unanswered.