Industry initiative aims to foster green software development
The Green Software Foundation says its focus is 'reduction, not neutralisation'
Tech giants including Microsoft, Accenture, GitHub, and Thoughtworks are among the founding members of a new climate-friendly initiative to drive sustainable software development.
The companies are all members of the Green Software Foundation, which has announced an initial specification for measuring software's carbon footprint, called Software Carbon Intensity (SCI).
The Green Software Foundation is an international coalition of non-profit organisations, academic institutions and private companies. It was formed under the Linux Foundation and focuses on creating a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and best practices for building green software.
The Foundation defines green software as software that is responsible for emitting fewer greenhouse gases.
'Our focus is reduction, not neutralisation,' it says.
Developers can use the newly released alpha version of the SCI specification to 'easily account for software carbon intensity in their day-to-day work in the same way they consider cost, performance, security, accessibility and other concerns today.'
The Foundation added, 'The SCI is not a total carbon footprint [measure]; it's a rate of carbon emissions for software, such as per minute or per user device.'
The main aim of the new specification is to offer the software industry a method for scoring a software system based on its carbon emissions - enabling them to contribute to a more sustainable future.
Chris Lloyd-Jones, head of open technologies at Avanade, says the basic idea behind SCI is to "have a score to drive down your carbon footprint," rather than measuring the total carbon footprint. This enables developers to look for ways to make their code more energy-efficient and take steps to cut the carbon footprint of the software they develop.
The only way to reduce an SCI score, according to the Foundation, is by taking one or more of the following three measures:
- Using less hardware
- Using less energy
- Using energy more intelligently (i.e from renewables, or doing more tasks when the energy supply is coming from clean sources)
'Lower SCI scores are better than higher scores,' the Foundation says, but 'reaching zero is impossible.'
In the future, the Foundation plans to issue green software engineering standards, patterns and practices across various technology domains and computing disciplines. It will encourage software development teams to adopt those standards.
Far from the first move
Many large tech firms have signed key declarations to combat climate change in recent years.
Earlier this year, leading players in the European data centre and cloud infrastructure industry signed the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact - with a commitment to lead the European industry in its transition to a climate-neutral economy.
As part of the pact, 25 companies and 17 trade associations agreed to take steps to make their data centres climate neutral by 2030.
In September, the UN-backed 'Race to Zero' campaign announced that 40 per cent of the world's major IT companies (by revenue) were taking part, committing to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 at the latest.
Software giants Adobe and Oracle are among the latest tech firms to sign up to the campaign.
Companies are also making their own commitments, outside of industry initiatives.
In 2019, Amazon pledged to be 100 per cent powered by renewable energy by 2025 and carbon neutral by 2040, a decade before the Paris Accord target for net zero emissions.
Last year, Apple promised to become 'carbon neutral' throughout its entire business, manufacturing supply chain and product life cycle by 2030. Microsoft made a commitment at the same time, when CEO Satya Nadella announced a $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund to speed the development of renewable and carbon-tackling technologies.
Microsoft says it will generate 100 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2025, including all electric power consumed by its buildings, campuses and data centres. The company also wants to remove "all of the carbon" it has ever released into the atmosphere since it was founded in 1975 by 2050.
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