Dear Victoria University of Wellington,

I am interested in how various institutions in NZ are mitigating the environmental impact of their activities.

A source of carbon emissions I have not seen much discussed in NZ is data storage on cloud services. A 2017 article in Stanford Magazine states that every 100Gb stored on the cloud can annually generate up to 0.2 tCO2e (https://medium.com/stanford-magazine/car...). This would equate to 2 tCO2e per terabyte per year.

Does Victoria University monitor and measure its use of cloud data services? If it does, please supply figures for the total size of VUW cloud data storage for the last five years, the particular cloud services which have been used, and any further relevant information that is available. If it doesn't, I would appreciate it if you give an estimate for current cloud use and what services are mainly involved.

Secondly, does VUW offset its carbon emissions resulting from cloud data storage? Or does it have any plans to offset these in future?

If you could please supply any reports or similar documents which help answer these questions, that would be appreciated.

Yours faithfully,

Michael Brown

Dear Georgia and OIA Requests,

Thanks for reply and the information provided. I won't need any further detail requiring the research you indicate.

Incidentally, the emissions resulting from cloud data storage are not just the result of the data centre energy use, but also arise from the (energy consuming) infrastructure needed to maintain live access and interaction across the world's data networks. Thus, even if the Microsoft data centres are carbon neutral, their use from New Zealand is not.

According to the Stanford article I cited in my request, storing data on the hard drive of your computer will result in around a millionth of the carbon emissions the same data stored on the cloud.

Yours sincerely,

Michael Brown