Update carbon control to latest version of Sustainable Web Design Model

[fershad]

Feature Request Summary

The Carbon Control feature currently implements the default carbon estimation model from CO2.js. At the time of writing, this is Sustainable Web Design Model version 3. However, this is an older version of the Sustainable Web Design Model and an updated version (Sustainable Web Design Model version 4 - SWDMv4) has now been released (see docs). This version is also available in CO2.js v0.16 - see release notes.

What's the motivation or use case for the change/feature?

Use a more recent model for carbon estimation.

[claud-io]

thanks @fershad we will take care of this in upcoming releases

[claud-io]

@fershad quick question on that: we took a look at this and for example ndtv.com moved from 4.8g per visit to 1.55g per visit. Seems reasonable to you?
Also is 0.6 still the top 100 site's median grams per visit?
Thanks

[fershad]

Hi @claud-io, sorry for the delay in getting back to you on this.

We do expect to see a reduction in the total emissions returned using the newer version of Sustainable Web Design (version 4). I can't talk about the case of specific websites, but we've talked about that change in this blog post: https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/news/understanding-the-latest-sustainable-web-design-model-update/ .

Regarding the 100 site's median grams per visit, I'm not sure what this is referencing.

[claud-io]

Hey @fershad, sorry typo on my end, i was referring of the median CO2 footprint of the top 1000 websites, which was 0.6g per visit

[fershad]

Thanks @claud-io, but I'm still not really sure what number you're referring to here - it's not something that we (Green Web Foundation) track, so I'm not able to help much without a source.

[claud-io]

Hey @fershad, fyi i was talking about the average carbon per visit (which was 0.6 based on web almanac of 2022) now seems that with swd v4 this value is lower like 0.3.
https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2024/sustainability#carbon-emissions