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I was recently joined by my colleague Paola Annis where we presented \u2018Green Software Engineering\u2019 at a community event. A couple of days later the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) released a study that highlighted climate change is widespread, rapid, and intensifying, and some trends are now irreversible. The United Nations called it a \u201ccode red for humanity\u201d and a catastrophe can only be avoided if the world acts fast.<\/p>\n
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Sustainability is about meeting the needs of the present – without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. It’s often broken into three pillars: social, economic, and environmental.<\/p>\n
The three categories are intertwined, and weakness in any one pillar will have a negative impact on the other pillars. Experts say that sustainability can only be truly achieved if all three pillars are looked after.<\/p>\n
Microsoft supports all of the UN goals around sustainability, but today it’s primarily focused on environmental sustainability in the four key areas of carbon, water, waste, and ecosystems. Back in January 2020 we announced a bold commitment and a detailed plan to operate with 100% renewable energy by 2025, and be carbon negative by 2030. We built on that pledge with a series of industry-leading commitments to be a water positive, zero waste company by 2030, and provide support for a number of biodiversity projects and conservation ecosystems to ensure we protect more land than we use. Things don\u2019t happen overnight, and this is journey, but we are now well on the road to deliver on these commitments.<\/p>\n
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges for mankind and in our lifetime, and as Software Engineers and Application Developers we can play our part here. We all need to be onboard to encourage and help everyone to build and deploy sustainable software applications.<\/p>\n
There are three things we can do:<\/p>\n
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Any hyper-scale cloud vendor will have substantial R&D budgets to ensure they reduce carbon emissions and be more energy efficient than what any enterprise organisation could achieve with their own on-premise datacenters for the same workload.<\/p>\n
We found that transitioning workloads to Microsoft cloud services could be up to 98% more carbon efficient and up to 93% more energy efficient than on-premise options, depending on a number of factors. These are documented in an independent study by WSP<\/a>.<\/p>\n When businesses choose Azure, they are taking positive action to reduce carbon emissions. It’s a compelling way to contribute to the climate goals of any company.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Technology can contribute to addressing environmental issues. As organisations use technology to drive business value, they also need think about enabling smarter growth and to transform sustainably \u2013 this can even create new business models.<\/p>\n Innovation in data acquisition and analytics, coupled with artificial intelligence and advanced robotics, as well as cloud computing, satellite and mapping imagery, have opened the door to many solutions. This is enabling optimal decision making and driving efficiencies, ultimately saving carbon and energy. An example of this is smart infrastructure like smart cities, smart transport and smart buildings using technology to measure and minimise carbon emissions, water consumption, and waste.<\/p>\nThink Smarter<\/h3>\n