Green Software

When talking about climate change, the Unit of CO2 equivalent in tonnes appears everywhere. At least for me, it was difficult to have an intuition of what this unit means. Is a tonne much or not? Is saving a Kg of CO2 worth it?

Let me take you through some examples which should help you understand the implications of of such values. First I want to give you some common CO2 values for the annual emissions of a human being, driving a car and flying. In the second part I will then show you three examples from IT, the CO2 emissions of a server, a mobile phone and the CO2 emissions of a news website.

Green Software is a concept defined by the Green Software Foundation with the goal to reduce the emission of CO2 to combat climate change. There are other terms in the realm of sustainability, but in this post, I want to focus on green software. The green software foundation is a non profit under the linux foundation. It defines green software with the following diagram. The goal of green software, is to reduce the amount of carbon emitted, not the neutralization of carbon that has already been emitted. It puts the software in the focus, as it is the main driver of CO2 in our IT solutions.