Green IO Conference 2024: Key takeaways
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Apidays Global London conference, the second day of which I dedicated my time to attending all 15 of the Green IO conference talks. Green IO is one of the few English-language podcasts on the topic of sustainable IT, and Gaël Duez — founder and host — and his team curated, MC’d and moderated a brilliant programme.
Here, I’m going to summarise my key lessons and highlights from the conference — and link to as many resources as possible for those of you who would like to learn more and join the Low-Carbon IT movement.
The main impression the conference left on me is that Low-Carbon IT is a much larger community than I had dreamed of — larger in continental Europe than in the UK by far, but also growing rapidly — for example, the team behind Green IO were overjoyed to report that London attendance this year was easily 10x that of 2023.
While the speakers brought a range of perspectives, there were a few common threads across all presentations:
- If you work in tech, you can make a difference. Your impact at an enterprise scale, everything from sharing information to writing software 1% better every time, has ripples and impact beyond your personal actions (e.g. using a paper straw versus reducing the emissions of 500,000 data transactions).
- Challenge greenwashing. It is critical to challenge suppliers — especially the hyper-scalers — on their sustainability claims. Real change will come from consumer pressure.
- Monitor your usage and resources. Measurement and reporting are key to understanding our challenges and successes — and legislation on that front is growing in terms of scope, seriousness and impact.
- Forget about the price tag (almost). We don’t need to be so money-focused — your average colleague actually does care about the future of the planet, and financial KPI’s are not always the best motivator (or success indicator).
- It is time to act. Waiting for the right data, right moment, right consensus, will only waste critical time. Every moment and action counts. “Progress is better than perfection.”
The talks were all fantastic; we covered a great range of relevant and interesting topics, and speakers were diverse in terms of age, gender, first language, and professional background (conference attendees were a true reflection of the industry which was very encouraging! Well-recruited and advertised on the organisers’ part.)
That said, the roster of speakers — unlike that of the Apidays conference, of which the Green IO conference was a part — was overwhelmingly white, and it would have been nice to have a couple of more global perspectives; the talks were very UK and mainland Europe-focused, and only one or two speakers (Daryl Elfield of KPMG and Sandra Pallier from Microsoft) made the explicit point linking technical sustainability to social inclusion and global inequality (touching on topics such as AI bias). That aside though, we covered a huge breadth of content with some real, actionable advice, thoughtful messaging and a hopeful, inspiring spirit.
We kicked off with a fantastic keynote from Chris Adams of the Green Web Foundation (GWF), discussing Consensus as a Climate Lever. He explored incoming regulation (Software Carbon Intensity is a recognised ISO as of March 2024), the GWF’s Carbon.txt project, and the use of — and blockers caused by requiring — consensus. He argued that consensus is ideal, but should not be binding if waiting for it delays progress, which was reflected throughout the later talks in the day. While many held different views on some approaches and details, they all agreed that climate action is too critical for us to wait around until we all agree.
Secondly was a talk I was very excited for: The Top 10 Green Software Tools on GitHub. Paull Young, GitHub’s Head of Sustainability walked us through the ten most starred projects of their recently launched ‘Green Software Directory’. Paul made a compelling case for why open-source working is foundational to combatting climate change: communal solutions for a communal problem. We, as technologists, are in a position to ‘bend the curve’ through the impact of the software we write — we can have an impact larger than ourselves in sharing that knowledge, too.
Third up was Ben Schwartz of GreeningOfStreaming, who gave us a fascinating presentation of the evolution of the challenges associated with streaming media content. Did you know that when streaming 1h of video, the data can touch over 40 physical devices before you see it? Not me! One of the key challenges he mentioned is the lexicon one of GreeningOfStreaming’s working groups have been investigating, as they discovered that different energy-related terms (e.g. ‘sleep mode’) can have very different technical definitions depending on the hardware, software and industry — fascinating stuff. The amount I learnt in his talk goes to show that his opening thought— “you have to engage with everyone, not just your own echo chamber” — really rings true.
James Martin from Scaleway spoke next, on ‘How to Limit Your Cloud Impact, from Bare Metal to AI’. This was a brilliant session, with the primary learning being on just how to hold your cloud providers accountable. Customer pressure will hold suppliers to better standards, he argued, and he walked us how to exert said pressure; explaining that it is important to interrogate providers on both PUE (Power Usage Efficacy) and WUE (Water Usage Efficacy) — noting that many are not yet reporting on the latter. Location can dictate how power efficient datacentres are — e.g. consider the power consumption of the country they are based in — do they use a lot of fossil fuels? “If they can’t measure it, it may well be greenwashing”, he said.
Up next was Mark Butcher, Director at Posetiv Cloud, with a blunt and impactful presentation entitled ‘Cloud Carbon Footprint, A View from the Trenches’. He emphasised the need to hold cloud suppliers to account with a blend of good humour and exasperation, which chimed well with the audience. Exploring evidence of datacentre emissions soaring, he also went into detail on a couple of case studies including one where a client’s emissions had gone up 4x after migrating to cloud — rather than being reduced, as per the cloud supplier’s promise. He added that “datacentres are not the problem,” but irresponsible usage and business requirements lacking green accountability result in unnecessary emissions. Finally, he warned against using financial savings as a green KPI, for two reasons:
- Not everyone cares the most about cost savings; you have to tailor your KPI’s to your team’s output and priorities
- While hyperscalers may use cost as a proxy for energy efficiency, spend can be reduced with discounts and deals, while emissions are still rising. Don’t fall for it.
“Challenge everything suppliers tell you,” he warned… or, words to that effect.
Following this was a Panel with speakers from Sopht (Magali Saúl, Alliance Manager, and Jérémie Veg, CEO, who moderated) and KPMG (Daryl Elfield, Partner). They rounded the talks of the morning so far beautifully, emphasising the importance of education and measurement to facilitate change, and recontextualised sustainable IT in a sociopolitical context as well as carbon context. They made some great practical recommendations for your sustainable IT journey, including just how critical it is to integrate sustainability into the transformation journeys your organization is already on. Agreeing with Mark’s talk earlier, they added that the first things you should do to challenge cloud providers’ claims are ask where their datacentres are located, and run simulations to be sure any carbon-saving claims ring true.
Before lunch we were treated to an overview of some new research by Ingenie in partnership with UCL, hearing from Ingenie CEO Tatania Collines, and UCL Professor Phillip Treleaven. They explored the work they had done, and as a result their findings: they thoroughly recommend benchmarks and indsutry standards, and highlighted that ecological efficacy has to catch up scaling demands. They highlighted that Venture Capital is increasingly interested in companies being carbon aware, and touched on the global relevance of this topic (discussing briefly the growth in ‘data tech’ in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait). Balancing efficacy with consumption is the key challenge when it comes to measuring — and managing — the carbon footprint of AI.
At lunch, I was lucky enough to get my hands on a signed copy of Building Green Software by Anne Currie, Sarah Hsu & Sara Bergman — which I cannot wait to read! It has to be said that the whole place was a-buzz, for the book signing and for the tasty food (no pictures — I was enjoying eating it too much!)… I am already enjoying the practical knowledge and accessible writing style I’ve found in this book — and think it might just be the first technical book I’ve ever owned written by three women — so cool!
The density of content did not let up after lunch — we kicked off again with a brilliant overview of W3C’s new Web Sustainability Guidelines by the fantastic Alexander Dawson. Alex introduced them with the clear and simple message that “sustainable practices increase trust, reduce waste, improve performance and increase accessibility” — undeniable, and about to be that little bit easier. They have been developed over the past 3 years, are aligned to the GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) and are based on W3’s WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative). I was blown away by not only the amount of content here, but also the many forms the team had made the effort to put it into, to make sure it’s really accessible to all — they have managed to condense its hundreds of pages (all open-source, for the good of the world) into a quick reference checklist and an API. Outstanding.
Next up was perhaps the most beautiful slide deck of the day — unsurprisingly a UX-flavoured presentation from Thorsten Jonas, Founder of the Sustainable UX Network (SUX). He asked us to consider reframing out approach to design, prioritising humanity over the individual human. We must consider what is genuinely disruptive, vs. what is actually destructive’, asking us to use ‘actor mapping’ to explore our products’ needs vs consequences. It is time to design sustainable default options, and question the wasteful practices which result in unnecessary data being processed. I think we all felt motivated to join the SUX community by the end of it!
Following this we were treated to a Case Study from Cambridge University Press & Assessment, by their CTO Julie Dennis and their Digital Sustainability Lead, Andri Johnston. They have worked across both the digitization from paper of swathes of the business, and are now working in collaboration with the University of Bristol’s DIMPACT to ensure the Digital does not become wasteful, either. The concept of ‘page weight’, and the challenges of running online learning for customers across the globe — with diverse technical facilities and networks — were the key things they were monitoring, and gave us some real insight into what an ongoing digital sustainability transformation journey looks like.
Tereze Gaile from Salesforce presented next, providing the perspective of one of the giant tech platforms we need to challenge — and she ratified the common thread: big platforms respond to client pressures to work sustainably. From her perspective, we took some interesting learnings about different emission types — e.g. she is cognizant that her work falls under her clients’ Scope 3 Emissions — and she hammered home the point that, in platform-client relationships, transparency is non-negotiable. Ask the questions, get answers, and if you don’t, take your business somewhere you will.
An expert panel came next: “Sustainability and AI: A Love-Hate Relationship?”, with our host Gaël Duez from Green IO moderating. The speakers — Anne Currie, Author of ‘Building Green Software’, Sandra Pallier, Microsoft, Maxime Fazilleau, Researcher and Engineer, and our keynote speaker Chris Adams of GWF, launched with a strong message: we, as pro-green technologists, have to join the AI conversation — or we won’t be part of it at all. They discussed the notion of ‘AI for sustainability’ (in contrast to ‘sustainable AI’) and highlighted the importance of knowing what type of AI — if any — is appropriate for the task a hand. Sandra put it frankly, “sometimes the most sustainable approach to AI is not to use it”. She later added, “and remember, AI is flawed. Think about the internet — the data GenAI is trained on. Consider — is this fit for purpose? Who is missing?”
When asked about the use of taking sustainability into account when discussing AI, Anne gave the quote of the day:
“There are two things we know are coming: AI and climate change. Not planning for BOTH of these things consitutes not planning for the future”. — Anne Currie
She advised strongly to make sure whatever you are doing, you do well — imagine it’s dynamically priced! — and use your resources carefully.
After the panel, Aiste Rugeviciute, a PhD candidate at La Rochelle University, presented to us the Corporate Digital Responsibility Maturity Model she has been working on. She reminded us that technology has an impact, both environmental and social — and advised us to think about digital solutions like medicine: usually helpful with the right conditions and dosage, but apply it wrong and you will at best feel no effect, and at worst experience bad side effects. As she reviewed the pillars of this model, she talked about the complexities of managing qualitative aspects as well as quantitative. She advised, “you can manage things you cannot measure, and it is a costly myth that you cannot. You shouldn’t wait for in-depth, detailed numbers to act.” Wise words!
The next speech was a breath of fresh air — an exciting start-up’s CEO delivering tongue-in-cheek advice informed by impressive experience beyond his years. Amael Parreaux-Ey, CEO of Resilio, taught us just how easy it can be to make your Green IT journey a disaster… and how to avoid doing so, if that’s what you prefer. His 5 anti-tips were: rush, ignore the value of stakeholders, jump alone, keep IT complex, and wait until you’re ready. His actual tips were: diagnose against standards and with tooling, win and leverage sponsorship, build a great team and network, clarify your mission and strategy, and don’t wait for perfection to act. Having grown Resilio from a university project to a team working with clients such as LVMH, he shared the lessons he has learnt with wisdom, good humour, and a critical final message: “You will never feel ‘ready’. Start now.”
The final session of the day was another AI topic — ‘Applying Sustainability to AI Governance’, from Ishmael Burdeau at DWP Digital. He taught us how to differentiate between risks and impacts when it comes to AI, and pointed out that even ‘sustainable AI’ comes with its own risks and impacts — citing The Jevons paradox. He also mentioned that carbon is not the only thing we need to consider — he and Amael both referred to our ‘planetary boundaries’ to introduce even more useful and tangible areas which can be impacted by digital overconsumption.
We wrapped up the day with a spot of networking sponsored by Github. It was a really delightful evening where the warmth, genius and passion of the Green IT community came through in every single conversation. It goes without saying… I’ll be back!
So, you want to grow your Green IT knowledge and network?
Check out these links:
- Green Software Foundation — and join me at the Global Summit Series (London) on 1st October — (or one more local to you)!
- Green Web Foundation
- Follow the work of Jo Lindsay Walton and Sasha Luccioni
- Join the online ClimateAction.tech community
- Listen to Green IO, Environment Variables, and Code Green podcasts — and Techologie and L’Octet Vert if you’re Francophone!
- Have a read of Building Green Software by Anne Currie, Sarah Hsu & Sara Bergman and Decarbonise Digital by Eric Zie
