This recap includes the following episodes and guests. 
Guest title reflects the guest's position at the time of the episode.

Recipes:

• Introduce Reporting with Clarity - Scopes of Emissions Explained

• Refine Metrics into Actionable Data

• Report in Terms That Matter

• SREs as Sustainability Engineers

• Think Like an Entrepreneur

• Engineer for Energy Efficiency

• Vision Drives Action

🧑‍🍳 Cookbook Chapter: Acting on What You Measure

Recipes for Turning Metrics into Meaningful Change

Introduce Reporting with Clarity - Scopes of Emissions Explained

🎯 Goal: Understand what you're measuring — and why it matters.

Before we can act on sustainability goals, we need to know what we’re reporting. Salil Narayanan broke down the three scopes of emissions in a way that helps us understand where our data fits:

• Scope 1: Direct emissions from owned or controlled sources — think fuel use in company vehicles or boilers.

• Scope 2: Indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, steam, heating, and cooling.

• Scope 3: All other indirect emissions — including those from your supply chain, product lifecycle, and even employee commuting.

Salil emphasized that Scope 3 is the hardest to measure but often the largest contributor:

“Visibility boils down to having access to that data, and it is still completely early days for that — especially when it relates to your supply chain.”

He also stressed the importance of starting with reliable data:

“If people start with accurate data from the ground up, then and only then would we get to an accurate picture.”

🛠️ Practical Tips:

• Start with Scope 1 and 2 using metered data and billing records.

• Use standard frameworks to guide Scope 3 estimation and improve over time.

• Treat sustainability data with the same rigor as financial data — audit, verify, and report transparently.

This foundation sets the stage for meaningful reporting — and ultimately, for action.

📈 Refine Metrics into Actionable Data

🎯 Goal: Turn dashboards into decisions.

Salil Narayanan emphasized that data is only the beginning:
“Access to good data and then being able to report on it is a first step. Usually that is the start of the journey to improve on sustainability metrics.”
But not all data is created equal. Salil stressed the importance of sourcing data directly:
“Make sure that you get data from source... not that you ask somebody to go and estimate or capture data.”

🗣️ Report in Terms That Matter

🎯 Goal: Communicate impact across technical and executive audiences.

Rishi brought the numbers to life:
“50 billion tons of greenhouse gases — that’s what we emit annually. To absorb that, we’d need to plant 1 trillion trees.”
He also pointed out the business case:
“75% of consumers are likely to switch brands based on sustainability.”

Salil warned that poor reporting can backfire:
“If you're not transparent, you can get into trouble... just like you would with any other financial data.”

🛠️ Practical Tips:

• Align your reporting with recognized standards (e.g., GHG Protocol).

• Ensure transparency in assumptions and boundaries.

• Tailor your message: use impactful analogies for execs and granular data for engineers.

💡 Think Like an Entrepreneur

🎯 Goal: Take ownership of outcomes, not just uptime.

Salil encouraged us to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset:
“If this is our business, how would we go about making it more efficient? How would we solve more problems?”
He reminded us that innovation doesn’t require a startup — it starts with ownership.

Rishi added that SREs can influence beyond infrastructure:
“Extend your reach into the applications too, so you can help the applications on top of that infrastructure run in a much more efficient manner.”

🛠️ Practical Tips:

• Treat sustainability as a shared OKR across teams.

• Collaborate with product and app teams to embed efficiency upstream.

• Use AI/ML to identify optimization opportunities in workloads.

⚡️ Engineer for Energy Efficiency

🎯 Goal: Reduce emissions by designing for smarter energy use.

As SREs, we often think about performance, availability, and cost — but energy consumption is increasingly part of the equation. Both Rishi and Salil emphasized that energy efficiency isn’t just a sustainability goal — it’s a systems design principle.

🧪 Rishi Vaish offered a practical starting point:

“Just turning machines off when you leave a room... with a virtual machine, shut it down and reclaim that capacity.”
“Development environments are often the easiest place to start — low risk, high impact.”

🛠️ Practical Tips:

• Audit your development and test environments regularly — shut down what’s idle.

• Use auto-scaling and right-sizing to avoid over-provisioning.

• Choose data centers powered by renewable energy when deploying workloads.

• Track and manage hardware energy use, including UPS systems and battery lifecycle.

This recipe is about evolving from reactive cleanup to proactive design. As Rishi put it, “You can always look at things and turn them into an opportunity depending on how you look at the problem.”

🛠️ Practical Tips:

• Define a clear sustainability goal (e.g., net-zero by 2030).

• Make it visible and actionable across teams.

• Use reporting not just to comply — but to motivate and mobilize.

💬 Let’s Talk About It

Here are a few questions to spark deeper conversations:

1. What’s one metric we track today that we haven’t yet turned into a decision?

2. How might we design our systems to default to sustainability, not just optimize for it?

3. What would it look like if SREs were measured not just on uptime, but on carbon impact?