ISO/IEC TS 20125-1:2026, “Information technology — Digital services ecodesign — Part 1: Ecopractices for life cycle stages,” is an ISO/IEC Technical Specification published in February 2026 by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 39/WG 4. It sets out requirements and recommendations for reducing the environmental impact of digital services across six life-cycle stages — requirements gathering, design, implementation, operations, maintenance, and end of life — through roughly two dozen “ecopractices,” each with concrete requirements, recommendations, and indicators.
As a Technical Specification rather than a full International Standard, it doesn’t come with an accredited third-party certification scheme. What it does define is a self-declared conformance model: organisations can claim Partial or Full conformance by implementing the applicable ecopractices and publicly disclosing their methodology, the environmental impacts they’ve acted on, and the indicators used. Getting that disclosure right — and having the engineering practices to back it up — is where most of the work lies.
What we offer
- Gap assessment — map your digital service against the standard’s applicable ecopractices (using its service-type cross-reference table) to see exactly where you stand
- Implementation support — set environmental budgets and indicators at each life-cycle stage, from requirements gathering through end-of-life planning
- Conformance disclosure — help drafting the public disclosure required for Partial or Full conformance, once your organisation is ready to self-declare
- Team training — workshops for engineering teams on what the standard requires and how to embed it in existing delivery workflows
How this relates to GSP™
ISO/IEC TS 20125 works at the level of a specific digital service: does this service follow recognised ecodesign practices at each life-cycle stage? Our GSP™ certification works one level up, at the organisation: does the team building it have the measurement infrastructure and improvement culture to keep meeting standards like this one over time, not just once. The two are complementary — see our post on RGESN and GSP™ for the fuller argument, which applies equally here.
