Digital preservation exists to safeguard knowledge for the future. But as the volume of digital content continues to grow, so too does the need to better understand the environmental impact of the systems, storage, infrastructure, and workflows that support long-term preservation.
That is why the release of the new Carbon Footprint Toolkit by the Digital Preservation Coalition marks an important moment for the digital preservation community.
Released in March 2026 as a draft for community comment and testing, the toolkit has been designed to help organizations undertaking digital preservation understand, measure, and reduce the carbon footprint of their activities in a practical and proportionate way.
For CLOCKSS, this work reflects a growing recognition that long-term stewardship of scholarly content must also consider long-term environmental sustainability.
Why this matters
Digital preservation is often discussed in terms of resilience, redundancy, integrity, and access. Yet behind every preserved file, replicated archive, and storage node sits physical infrastructure that consumes energy and resources.
As repositories, publishers, libraries, and preservation networks scale to meet the demands of an increasingly digital scholarly ecosystem, questions around environmental impact are becoming harder to ignore. How do we preserve critical knowledge responsibly? How can organizations balance resilience with sustainability? And how can institutions begin measuring their impact in meaningful, achievable ways?
The Carbon Footprint Toolkit aims to provide a practical starting point.
Rather than offering abstract sustainability principles, the toolkit provides actionable guidance that organizations can apply regardless of their size, technical infrastructure, or prior experience with carbon reporting. It includes both a written guide and a downloadable calculation tool designed to help institutions begin assessing the emissions associated with their digital preservation activities.
A collaborative international effort
The toolkit was created by the DPC’s Carbon Footprint Task Force, chaired by Alicia Wise. The initiative brought together expertise from across the international digital preservation community, drawing on experiences from organizations in Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, the UK, and the United States.
The work builds on broader conversations already taking place across the sector about environmental responsibility in digital infrastructure and preservation practice. In 2024, the DPC hosted discussions focused on environmental impact and digital preservation, including presentations examining how organizations can measure and reduce carbon emissions associated with preservation activities.
The creation of the task force itself reflected growing community demand for shared guidance and collaborative problem solving around sustainability challenges in preservation workflows and infrastructure.
CLOCKSS and sustainable preservation
At CLOCKSS, sustainability has always been central to how we think about preservation, both organizationally and technically.
The CLOCKSS archive was designed around a distributed preservation model intended to support long-term resilience and durability. But sustainability today also means considering environmental impact alongside preservation outcomes.
That is one reason why CLOCKSS has been actively engaged in broader sector conversations around environmentally sustainable digital preservation. Alicia Wise’s leadership of the DPC Carbon Footprint Task Force reflects CLOCKSS’s commitment not only to preserving the scholarly record, but also to helping shape responsible and sustainable preservation practices for the future.
Importantly, the toolkit recognizes that organizations are at very different stages of their sustainability journeys. Some institutions may already have established environmental reporting frameworks in place, while others may be approaching carbon measurement for the first time. The guidance has therefore been designed to be flexible, practical, and iterative, encouraging organizations to begin where they are and improve over time.
A toolkit shaped by community feedback
The current release is intentionally a draft version. Over the coming months, the DPC will work with a support group of participating organizations to test the toolkit and develop case studies ahead of the planned full release in September 2026.
This collaborative testing phase is particularly important because environmental sustainability in digital preservation is still an emerging area of practice. There is no single model that works for every institution, repository, or preservation network. Community feedback will help ensure the final toolkit remains useful, realistic, and adaptable across diverse organizational contexts.
For CLOCKSS, this spirit of collaboration is essential. Digital preservation has always depended on collective action, shared infrastructure, and community-led solutions. Addressing environmental sustainability will require the same approach.
Looking ahead
The release of the Carbon Footprint Toolkit is not the end of a conversation, it is the beginning of one.
As digital preservation continues to evolve, sustainability will increasingly become part of how organizations evaluate infrastructure, workflows, storage strategies, and long-term stewardship responsibilities. Tools like this help move those conversations from theory into practice.
Preserving knowledge for future generations remains the core mission. Ensuring we do so responsibly and sustainably is part of that responsibility too.