The carbon footprint of the great business schools’ websites

The sector of business schools

In France, there are more than 200 business schools. Every year, about 200 000 students come in this formation with a high level. Indeed, business schools train students to the commercial profession, management and company management. Everyone has its specificity and its own working process, most of them have some prestigious partnerships with other schools and foreign universities.

Concerning them, students integrating these schools I’m more concerned nowadays about the environment, and global warming. Indeed, for 32% of young French people, the environment is a major concern. Real challenge for business schools, students wish more and more to find these is value in their choice of school. It’s still the case when they made their choice of company and future professions. So, we can ask ourselves the following questions: will the students be sensible to the digital pollution of their school? And what’s the consideration of the digital sobriety in digital policies in these establishments?

Which websites of business schools pollute the most? Who are the good students?

Our tool Greenoco measures the carbon footprint of websites. It has allowed us to measure the carbon emissions of every home page of business schools’ websites.

The approach doesn’t aim here to blame establishments that don’t have integrated the reduction of carbon footprint of websites on their approach. Indeed, this approach is new, and some websites made a couple years ago don’t take into account this web eco-design approach in their charges book. But this audit of measure allows to make a state of play, and so to identify the potential improvements.

So, what are the results for this study? The array underneath presents the results of the study (made in August 2022). The gaps are important because we note carbon emissions going from 0.22 grams per homepage viewed to 5.88 grams. That is a ratio of 1 to 20 between establishments!

Measure realized the 8/08/2022 on the homepage of every site.

This array presents the carbon emissions measured by Greenoco on every home page at a time. This is not representative of the whole carbon footprint of websites, because we would need for this to have audiences and the URL of every page of every site. If we are in capacity to realize these audits with Greenoco, this first analysis of the homepage allows to obtain an initial educational measure.

The results:

We can see that the most virtuous side is the one of the school RENNES SB, with emissions to 0.22 grams per homepage viewed. Within the most virtuous, we also have the schools of Montpellier SB, KEDGE (0.31 grams and 0.34 grams) then the EM NORMANDIE at the third place.

Among sites offering the most possible optimizations, the one of the school of ESCP is the leader, with emissions of 5.88 grams per homepage viewed, followed by the EM Strasbourg with 3.62 grams. The school of sustainable development, ESI BUSINESS, is in 16th position, with 1.42 grams of emission per homepage viewed.

Reduce the carbon emissions of websites

So how do business schools can act to reduce their digital carbon footprint? We have developed a tool allowing to calculate precisely the carbon emissions of websites and to identify optimizations allowing to reduce them. We analyze the pictures files, typologies files, CSS, JS, or HTML files. In resumed, we analyze all charged resources to display a web page.

We also integrate in this analysis, the host countries and the carbon intensity of produced electricity in every country, also other parameters, to calculate the carbon footprint of the website, per page viewed.

Reduce the position of websites of great business schools

In Greenoco, we have an objective:  reduce the related carbon emissions to the use of the internet, a way to develop an Internet greener and more optimized.

Thus, we proposed to business schools an audit of their website to realize. We will give the whole results of the analysis, in order to allow them to reduce the carbon emissions of their websites. We could realize an audit once these optimizations have been realized so we could make another ranking.

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Business School: we will be happy to help you reduce your carbon emissions. Contact us!