Playing for the Planet, the UNEP-driven alliance for tackling gaming’s environmental impact, has partnered with The Carbon Trust to develop a new carbon calculator for the video gaming industry.

The aim of the partnership is to develop a simple and user-friendly calculator tailored for studios and developers and focussing on where emissions are largest and in need of the greatest attention.

The Playing for the Planet Alliance is aiming to build the calculator by Spring 2024 which will be aligned to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the de facto corporate carbon footprinting standard for industry.

The calculator will build on last year’s collaborative report, Untangling the carbon complexities of the video gaming industry, authored by The Carbon Trust with input from Playing for the Planet members. It tackles some of the most challenging parts of carbon footprinting for video game businesses.

The new calculator will incorporate the learnings from the report which was developed with inputs from ten major studios. Emission sources covered by the calculator will include business operations (such as energy use and company vehicles) and the value chain (like emissions from data centres, advertising services, and emissions from playing the games made by studios).

Video gaming’s annual environmental impact

The partnership was announced in the same week Playing for the Planet launched its Annual Impact Report 2023 for the video gaming industry, in which it was detailed – among the headlines achievements of the past year – that 25.9% of Alliance members have now started their Scope 3 accounting activities.

Playing for the Planet’s Impact report provide a year-on-year review of the work of the Alliance, facilitated by the UN Environment programme and its membership. Last year, the Alliance continued to build green activations into games as a way of prompting real-world action. This year, nearly 80 studios have signed up to the Green Game Jam initiative with a focus of inspiring one million people to take action in the real world.

Meanwhile, and continuing last year’s work on a scalable plastics reduction protocol, Alliance members Bandai Namco, SEGA Europe, and Ubisoft teamed up to reduce the industry’s plastic footprint. 

Among the aims laid out for 2024, the Alliance now wants to further its research and build connections between industry and academia to develop a framework that validates the appetite for green activations with games themselves and the connection between games and real-world actions.

SEO of the Playing for the Planet Alliance member, SYBO, Matthias Gredal Nørvig, said: “As we all know, climate change cannot be solved alone. Playing for the Planet has provided SYBO with a strong community that shares our values and goals and the work of the other remarkable companies in the Alliance constantly motivates and inspires our team to go even bigger with our green activations.”