2024 Green Software Foundation London Summit: Accelerating Green Software Adoption through Measurement and Transparency

As we look to the future, one thing is certain: improving energy efficiency across the entire software industry must be at the forefront of our efforts to combat climate change. The green software movement is playing a critical role in reducing the industry’s carbon footprint through technology and software advancements. But given increasingly dire warning of just how much global temperature may rise in the coming decades, it is clear that for this movement to truly succeed, it must be reinforced by continuous dialogue and unified action across the industry to drive truly meaningful change.

Since 2022, BCG X has been a key member of the Green Software Foundation's (GSF) steering committee, playing a pivotal role in advancing sustainable software practices. On October 1, BCG X hosted the London Summit, part of a global series of events held from October 1–10. This year’s summit focused on advancing measurement and reporting frameworks, with a particular emphasis on fostering collaboration and increasing transparency within the software development ecosystem. The goal: to drive collective progress toward greener, more responsible software solutions.

The evening summit event brought together more than 70 leaders and practitioners from the technology, software, AI, and data science communities. The group’s dynamic, thought-provoking discussions centered around the crucial intersection of software innovation and climate action.

Step 1 in Reducing Emissions: Accurate Measurement

GSF’s mission is to build a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and best practices for green software. One of its primary focuses is to support the creation of tools designed to accurately measure the environmental impact of software as well as to report on sustainability initiatives. The most powerful way for GSF to improve carbon emissions reduction in the industry is by developing measurement standards. Developing these standards enables everyone from software developers to engineers to marketers to be on the same page with respect to measuring, reporting on, and problem solving around emissions.

The organization is also working to define exactly what “Green AI” means. Is AI just the model, or does it also include the infrastructure needed to deploy it? What is the functional unit of AI? Should it be measured per prompt or per token or something else? And when we think of measurement, we need to think of the full user journey. One model might return an answer more quickly and consume less energy, but the user might need ten more prompts to get a useable answer. We need more indicators to help users make more sustainable choices.

Decarbonization Can Boost Your Bottom Line

GSF itself has been clear that moving the needle requires efforts at both individual and organizational levels. Findings from the 4^th edition of BCG and CO2 AI’s Carbon Emissions Report (published September 2024) revealed that many of the climate leaders from the survey realized significant value from their decarbonization efforts, including financial benefits equal to more than 7% of their organization’s revenues, for an average net benefit of $200 million a year. The report also found that companies leveraging AI to reduce emissions are 4.5 times more likely to experience significant decarbonization benefits. This finding underscores the importance of deploying AI responsibly, particularly in areas where it can drive meaningful environmental impact. And it makes it clear that companies can actually make money and decarbonize at the same time.

But more work remains. Of the nearly 2,000 companies BCG and CO2 AI surveyed, only 9% said that they comprehensively reported on Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. And only 16% of these companies said that they had set targets across all three scopes.

A Sustainable Future Is A Transparent Future

One way to encourage companies to take stronger action on emissions reduction is to educate them on the importance of sharing emissions-data. We want a future in which we are being fully transparent with all of our data, all of our emissions. We want everyone to share their progress, because the best way for the industry to advance quickly is through people challenging each other, questioning each other’s solutions, and proposing better solutions.

One such solution is GSF’s Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specification. The SCI defines a methodology for calculating the rate of carbon emissions for a software system. The purpose is to help users and developers make informed choices about which tools, approaches, architectures, and services they use in the future.

Another solution is Root & Branch’s tool, Cardamon, which enables development teams to measure the power consumption and carbon emissions of their software. Cardamon is built around the concept of “observations” and “scenarios.” A scenario encapsulates a usage behavior that you want to measure (e.g. add items to basket). You can then run your code against these repeatable behaviors and see how your software power consumption changes over time. Implementing tools like Cardamon fosters more accurate measurement and enables teams to make informed, data-driven improvements to reduce their carbon footprint effectively.

As BCG X Managing Director and Senior Partner Sylvain Duranton noted during the summit, companies must be committed to acquiring the data they need to accurately measure emissions, and then be willing to “share everything everywhere.”

Driving Cultural Change to Realize Impact

During a summit session on driving innovation and impact, Sylvain noted that he was “a 100% believer in measuring, but in the end we need a sort of cultural change.” The speakers agreed, acknowledging that this change can take many forms. Sylvain referred to the stickers that many industries include on their products to provide consumers with important information. Consumers are now used to referring to these stickers to learn how many calories a food contains, how much energy a refrigerator uses per year, or how much carbon will be emitted in a transcontinental flight. But, he said, “there are no stickers that tells us how much energy a chatbot query will consume.”

On another level, we need to create a culture in which actions at both the executive and the grassroots level can drive change. Many engineers or software developers might work quietly on projects that promise to make software more sustainable. But when their CEO suddenly makes a public statement supporting that kind of work, people working at the grassroots can feel like they have permission to pursue those changes. To push the industry forward, we need movement on both levels: by engineers and software developers working on innovative solutions — and by senior-level executives willing to step up and support those efforts.

As the summit ended, Sylvain noted that change related to sustainability must take place across entire ecosystems — across entire value chains. No one has the key to the solution, he said. No one can be the sole authority. “Only by working together can we go forward, and I’m confident that the software development community has the mindset to take on a challenge of this size and work collectively to reduce emissions at the scale they must be made.”

One concrete step members of the software development community can make toward this goal is to learn more about the Green Software Foundation. A further step is to become a member of the organization and help accelerate a rapid global transition to greener, more responsible software. Learn more here.