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In this report, we examine the available evidence regarding ICT's current and projected climate impacts. We examine peer-reviewed studies which estimate ICT's current share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to be 1.8-2.8% of global…
Due to increased computing use, data centers consume and emit a lot of energy and carbon. These contributions are expected to rise as big data analytics, digitization, and large AI models grow and become major components of daily working…
ATLAS, a general-purpose experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), makes use of a large internationally-distributed computing infrastructure, including over $10^6$ TB of managed data on disk and tape and almost one million…
Navigation apps use routing algorithms to suggest the best path to reach a user's desired destination. Although undoubtedly useful, navigation apps' impact on the urban environment (e.g., carbon dioxide emissions and population exposure to…
Scientific workflows facilitate the automation of data analysis, and are used to process increasing amounts of data. Therefore, they tend to be resource-intensive and long-running, leading to significant energy consumption and carbon…
Natural computing offers new opportunities to understand, model and analyze the complexity of the physical and human-created environment. This paper examines the application of natural computing in environmental informatics, by…
The soaring energy demands of large-scale software ecosystems and cloud data centers, accelerated by the intensive training and deployment of large language models, have driven energy consumption and carbon footprint to unprecedented…
In Green Software Development, quantifying the energy footprint of a software system is one of the most basic activities. This documents provides a high-level overview of how the energy footprint of a software system can be estimated to…
To meet the increasing demand for cloud computing services, the scale and number of data centers keeps increasing worldwide. This growth comes at the cost of increased electricity consumption, which directly correlates to CO2 emissions, the…
As computing hardware becomes more specialized, designing environmentally sustainable computing systems requires accounting for both hardware and software parameters. Our goal is to design low carbon computing systems while maintaining a…
Data centers are carbon-intensive enterprises due to their massive energy consumption, and it is estimated that data center industry will account for 8\% of global carbon emissions by 2030. However, both technological and policy instruments…
Achieving carbon neutrality has become a critical goal in mitigating the environmental impacts of human activities, particularly in the face of global climate challenges. Input/Output (I/O) devices, such as keyboards, mice, displays, and…
Carbon matching aims to improve corporate carbon accounting by tracking emissions rather than energy consumption and production. We present a mathematical derivation of carbon matching using marginal emission rates, where the unit of…
With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), the percentage of global emissions attributable to Information Systems is expected to further increase in the coming years, due to a proliferation of Internet-connected devices omnipresent in…
Sustainability has over the past two decades emerged as a key concern in human-computer interaction, with a much critiqued focus on quantification and eco-feedback. This approach fits within a modernist framing of sustainability, treating…
The carbon footprint of astronomical research is an increasingly topical issue with first estimates of research institute and national community footprints having recently been published. As these assessments have typically excluded the…
We make a case for "planetary computing" -- infrastructure to handle the ingestion, transformation, analysis and publication of global data products for furthering environmental science and enabling better informed policy-making. We draw on…
You hear a lot about environmental issues, you may have initiated positive personal attitudes, you have a group will in your unit, and you are wondering about the environmental impact of digital technology in your professional…
By providing unprecedented access to computational resources, cloud computing has enabled rapid growth in technologies such as machine learning, the computational demands of which incur a high energy cost and a commensurate carbon…
Footprints provide a way to estimate the relative impact of processes and products on the global climate. Including footprint analysis in a course on energy simultaneously provides students with an understanding of this tool and a…