Sustainability

Overview

Sustainability in OneLens brings your cloud carbon emissions, and where the provider publishes it your water footprint, alongside the cost data you already have in the platform. The same accounts, subscriptions and projects you onboarded for cost reporting become the basis for emissions reporting, so your environmental figures follow the same hierarchy, cost centres and business structure as your spend.

This is designed for teams who report under frameworks such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) or the GHG Protocol, and for anyone who wants emissions visible next to the workloads that cause them.

These pages assume your cloud accounts are already connected to OneLens. If you have not completed that yet, start with Cloud & Cost Sources.

What data OneLens reads

OneLens reads only the emissions and water estimates that your cloud provider already publishes for your own usage. No new agent is installed, nothing is deployed into your environment, and no additional telemetry is collected from your workloads.

Provider	Source of the data	What OneLens reads
Amazon Web Services	AWS Sustainability service	Estimated carbon emissions and estimated water withdrawals
Microsoft Azure	Carbon optimization	Estimated carbon emissions
Google Cloud	Carbon Footprint	Estimated carbon emissions

Every figure is an estimate produced by the cloud provider using its own published methodology. OneLens does not recalculate or model emissions; it reads the provider's numbers, aligns them to your OneLens hierarchy, and presents them over time.

Coverage at a glance

	AWS	Azure	Google Cloud
Carbon emissions	Monthly	Monthly	Monthly
History available	From January 2022	Last 12 months	From January 2021
Scope 1, 2 and 3 breakdown	Yes	Yes	Yes
Location-based and market-based	Both	Location-based	Both
Breakdown by	Account, region, service	Subscription, resource group, resource, resource type, location	Project, service, region
Water	Annual, from 2023	Not published	Not published
Published by	21st of the following month	19th of the following month	15th of the following month

Only AWS currently publishes a customer-level water figure. Microsoft and Google publish water data at company level in their own sustainability reports, but neither attributes water to an individual customer's usage, so water panels in OneLens show AWS data only.

Emissions scopes

All three providers report your cloud emissions across the greenhouse gas accounting scopes, which is what makes the data usable in a formal disclosure:

• Scope 1 - direct emissions from the provider's own operations, such as on-site fuel use and backup generators.

• Scope 2 - emissions from the electricity the provider purchases to run the infrastructure your workloads use.

• Scope 3 - indirect emissions across the provider's value chain, such as hardware manufacturing and data centre construction.

Where a provider offers both, OneLens keeps the location-based and market-based figures separate. Location-based reflects the average carbon intensity of the local grid; market-based reflects the energy the provider has contracted for, including renewable purchases. The two are not interchangeable, and most disclosure frameworks ask for a specific one.

What you need to do

Each cloud needs a short, one-time setup before its data appears. Follow the page for each provider you have connected:

• Sustainability for AWS - add four read-only permissions to the role OneLens already uses, using the CloudFormation template provided or by hand.

• Sustainability for Azure - assign one built-in role to the OneLens application on each subscription.

• Sustainability for Google Cloud - turn on the Carbon Footprint export and schedule its backfill. No new permissions are needed.

Every permission described in these pages is read-only, and none of them grants access to your workloads, your data or your configuration.

What to send back to OneLens

Most of the setup needs nothing from you afterwards, because OneLens already holds the access it uses. There is one exception.

Cloud	What we need from you
Amazon Web Services	Nothing, unless you configured an account other than the one you originally connected.
Microsoft Azure	Nothing, unless you assigned the role on only some of your onboarded subscriptions. Tell us which.
Google Cloud	The project ID and dataset ID holding the Carbon Footprint export. OneLens cannot discover where you created it. The table name is always carbon_footprint, so there is nothing to tell us about that.

Before you begin

Emissions data is published by each provider on a monthly cycle, and the earliest data appears only after a full month of usage. A newly created account, subscription or project will show nothing until its first full month has been published.