Linking Environment and Advertising Framework (or short: LEAF), is a sustainability framework by IAB Europe, specifically designed to facilitate digital businesses to track and subsequently reduce the negative environmental impact of their online advertising activities.
What Is LEAF?
From a technical standpoint, the LEAF suite includes two key utilities, aimed in helping companies to evaluate and downsize the potential toll of their digital advertising campaigns on the environment, particularly by reducing the volume of their greenhouse gas (GHG) and carbon emissions.
Namely, these utilities are:
- OpenGHG – an advanced tool, aimed at the precise estimation of GHG emissions, associated with a certain digital ad activity/campaign, in accordance with the existing global standards.
- CreativeLi – enables optimizing the size of digital ad creatives to lower the volume of carbon and GHG emissions, without compromising their visual quality, hence maintaining the best possible viewer experience with the ads.
Benefits of Using LEAF
First and foremost, the new IAB Europe’s LEAF initiative enables businesses working in online advertising to stay informed of the global and regional sustainability standards and best practices within one digital hub.
More importantly, it also allows enhancing the actual carbon and GHG footprint measurement of their cross-platform ad campaigns, and improve their sustainability metrics in a more seamless way.
Pricing & Perspectives of Adoption
While the use of LEAF is free for IAB Europe member companies, members of other (national/regional) IAB bodies will need to pay 495 EUR + VAT to sign up for their LEAF account and get access to its features for 1 year.
As for the non-member LEAF annual subscription price, it currently is 545 EUR + VAT.
Given the price discrepancies, the perspectives of the LEAF adoption across the globe remains vague as of Q3 2025. The most probable scenario is, its implementation can get traction among ad companies, primarily working in the EU/EEA, where the sustainability laws and regulations in digital advertising are relatively stricter, compared to other regions, with the global market players joining the initiative in 2026 or later.