Edited by Christopher Douce, Friday 30 October 2026 at 11:42
In my role as school teaching sustainability lead, I’ve collected a set of links to tools and resources that relate to computing, coding and energy consumption. This short blog shares some of those resources, shared in no particular order. In some respects, this post is an update to a previous post.
Organisations
Green software foundation
The Green software foundation is described as ‘a nonprofit building the standards, tools, and community the tech industry needs to make software part of the climate solution’. Its mission is to ‘Build a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and best practices for creating and building green software’, and its vision is to ‘change the culture of building software so sustainability becomes a core priority — just as important as performance, security, cost and accessibility’ (Green Software Foundation website, 2026).
The Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification has also become a standard, ISO/IEC 21031:2024 Information technology - Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specification. Standards are important; they help to define things and can be used to encapsulate knowledge and practises.
SPEC, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), is described as 'a non-profit corporation, establishes and maintains standardized, vendor-agnostic benchmarks and tools to evaluate performance and energy efficiency for the newest generations of computing systems' (SPEC website, accessed October 26).
It is worth paying attention to the what the W3C is getting up to.
Projects
I’ve also become aware of a number of projects:
Green Coding
Green Coding appears to be a business that offers consultancy and advice services. It also has developed something called a Green Metrics Tool which is available to download as open source software. Some questions that immediately come to mind are: what does this software do? How does it work? And, what does it measure?
Code Carbon
Code Carbon ‘is a French non-profit building free, open-source tools for developers and researchers’. Their website gives details of a number of projects, including something called EcoLogits described as ‘a suite of open source tools for estimating the environmental footprint of generative AI models at inference. empowering developers and organizations to build more sustainable AI-powered applications’ (EcoLogits project summary page, 2026).
Cloud Carbon Footprint
Cloud Carbon Footprint is a tool that ‘provides a way for organizations to measure, monitor, and reduce their carbon emissions from the cloud. It supports connecting to multiple cloud providers, allowing you to get a full picture of your cloud emissions’ (Cloud Carbon Footprinr docs 2026).
Carbon Literacy Project
TheCarbon Literacy Project isn’t about technology, IT or code; it is an education project that aims to foster societal change. Here is a summary: ‘the Project empowers individuals, organisations and communities with the knowledge, skills and motivation to take real, measurable action on climate change’. The project also ‘certifies individuals as Carbon Literate, and accredits courses, trainers, organisations … providing the frameworks to enable others to do so, at scale and with impact’. A key impact is to develop personal individual awareness of decisions that we make.
EnergiBridge
Turning away from the bigger picture, from the cloud and AI engines, and towards the machine itself, there is a project called EnergiBridge which is simply described as ‘A cross-platform tool to measure software energy consumption (CPU, GPU, RAM)’.
This talk mentions a number of resources mentioned in this blog, such as the Green Software Foundation (in the context of a maturity model), and the Currie et al. book (in the context of zombie servers) – which makes me think I might have listened to this video before. Charles makes really interesting points about the importance of testing, server choices, and benchmarks. A really helpful point is that it is hard to carry out measurements, which means we must make use of ‘proxies’.
Although not as technical as Charles’ talk, Ian’s talk is engaging and persuasive. Early on in his talk, he shares a thought provoking opinion: ‘If you update your laptop every two years… you are committing an ecological crime’, referring to the embodied carbon that it contains (the energy that has gone into its manufacture).
Books
Here are two technical books, both are available through the OU library (if you’re a student or a member of staff). The first one is mentioned by Humble:
Currie, A., Hsu, S. and Bergman, S. (2024) Building green software : a sustainable approach to software development and operations. O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Turning to an earlier book, and one that is referenced within TM354 Software Engineering:
Bass, L, Clements, P. and Kazman, R. (2021) Software Architecture in Practice, 4th Edition. Addison-Wesley Professional.
Although Bass’s book is not specifically about environmental computing or green code, the Energy Efficiency section, which can be found in part II of his textbook is particularly interesting.
Turning to a different type of book, I do recommend:
Pitron, G. (2023) The Dark Cloud: How the digital world is costing the earth. Scribe.
This one is a bit of an eye opener, but it directly relates to the themes presented within the videos.
Finally, I have two on my To Be Read (TBR) pile:
Siddharth, K. (2023) Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. St. Martin’s Press.
This book is mentioned by Mudway. This speaks to wider and very significant issues, including power, capitalism and colonialism.
Richards, H. (2024) Not the End of the World. Vintage.
This is mentioned in the Charles Humble video, but I first learnt about it by browsing through a bookshop.
Podcasts
There are not many podcasts available on this topic. The Climatestack podcast mentioned in Charles Humble’s lecture appears to have disappeared.
Here are a list of articles that I’ve found particularly interesting:
Lago, P. et al. (2021) ‘Designing for Sustainability: Lessons Learned from Four Industrial Projects’. In: Kamilaris, A., Wohlgemuth, V., Karatzas, K., Athanasiadis, I.N. (eds) Advances and New Trends in Environmental Informatics. Progress in IS. Springer, Cham. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61969-5_1
Manotas, I. et al. (2016) 'An Empirical Study of Practitioners' Perspectives on Green Software Engineering. IEEE/ACM 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). 14-22 May 2016. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/2884781.2884810
Moreira, A. et al. (2025) ‘A Roadmap for Integrating Sustainability into Software Engineering Education’. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Vol. 34 (5). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3708526
Wolfram, N. et al. (2018) 'Sustainability in software engineering'. Sustainable Internet and ICT for Sustainability (SustainIT). 06-07 December 2017. Available at: https://doi.org/10.23919/SustainIT.2017.8379798
Reflections
When you begin to study this topic, you soon realise there are so many other subjects that demand attention. Looking immediately within software engineering and software development, we can see the importance and significance of ethics. Look a little further, we found ourselves studying rich domains of sociology and politics.
Whilst writing this post, I did have a quick look at the current version of the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge. I was struck that it contained very little about environmental computing. It mentioned sustainability, but in terms of the longevity and flexibility of engineered systems, rather than environmental sustainability.
One key theme is clearly evident: the importance of measurement. It is perhaps no surprise that a number of measurement or modelling tools have been built. Knowing about the diversity of these tools immediately provokes a number of research questions, such as ‘how are they different from each other?’, ‘what exactly do they measure?’ and ‘to what extent are they appropriate or useful for certain types of software system?’
The more I look into this subject, the more I find there is to read.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are given to Michael Snowden, Andrea Davanzo and Ian Kennedy for making me aware of some of the resources that are featured in this post.
Green software: tools and resources
In my role as school teaching sustainability lead, I’ve collected a set of links to tools and resources that relate to computing, coding and energy consumption. This short blog shares some of those resources, shared in no particular order. In some respects, this post is an update to a previous post.
Organisations
Green software foundation
The Green software foundation is described as ‘a nonprofit building the standards, tools, and community the tech industry needs to make software part of the climate solution’. Its mission is to ‘Build a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and best practices for creating and building green software’, and its vision is to ‘change the culture of building software so sustainability becomes a core priority — just as important as performance, security, cost and accessibility’ (Green Software Foundation website, 2026).
A quick look into this site takes me to the Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification pages https://sci.greensoftware.foundation/. In turn, there is a link to a SCI GitHub project page.
The Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification has also become a standard, ISO/IEC 21031:2024 Information technology - Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specification. Standards are important; they help to define things and can be used to encapsulate knowledge and practises.
Government Digital Sustainability Alliance (GDSA)
Looking at everything from a slightly different angle, I have long bookmarked something called the Government Digital Sustainability Alliance (GDSA). There is a more friendly and earlier to read UK Government Sustainable ICT blog. This is potentially useful, since government is a huge user of IT.
SPEC
SPEC, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), is described as 'a non-profit corporation, establishes and maintains standardized, vendor-agnostic benchmarks and tools to evaluate performance and energy efficiency for the newest generations of computing systems' (SPEC website, accessed October 26).
W3C Sustainable Web interest group
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines everything that relates to the World Wide Web. Within this umbrella organisation, there is the Sustainable Web Interest Group.
The W3C has also produced something called the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG). An accompanying document is something called the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) Impact Ratings.
It is worth paying attention to the what the W3C is getting up to.
Projects
I’ve also become aware of a number of projects:
Green Coding
Green Coding appears to be a business that offers consultancy and advice services. It also has developed something called a Green Metrics Tool which is available to download as open source software. Some questions that immediately come to mind are: what does this software do? How does it work? And, what does it measure?
Code Carbon
Code Carbon ‘is a French non-profit building free, open-source tools for developers and researchers’. Their website gives details of a number of projects, including something called EcoLogits described as ‘a suite of open source tools for estimating the environmental footprint of generative AI models at inference. empowering developers and organizations to build more sustainable AI-powered applications’ (EcoLogits project summary page, 2026).
Cloud Carbon Footprint
Cloud Carbon Footprint is a tool that ‘provides a way for organizations to measure, monitor, and reduce their carbon emissions from the cloud. It supports connecting to multiple cloud providers, allowing you to get a full picture of your cloud emissions’ (Cloud Carbon Footprinr docs 2026).
Carbon Literacy Project
TheCarbon Literacy Project isn’t about technology, IT or code; it is an education project that aims to foster societal change. Here is a summary: ‘the Project empowers individuals, organisations and communities with the knowledge, skills and motivation to take real, measurable action on climate change’. The project also ‘certifies individuals as Carbon Literate, and accredits courses, trainers, organisations … providing the frameworks to enable others to do so, at scale and with impact’. A key impact is to develop personal individual awareness of decisions that we make.
EnergiBridge
Turning away from the bigger picture, from the cloud and AI engines, and towards the machine itself, there is a project called EnergiBridge which is simply described as ‘A cross-platform tool to measure software energy consumption (CPU, GPU, RAM)’.
Resources
Videos
Writing Greener Software by Charles Humble
This talk mentions a number of resources mentioned in this blog, such as the Green Software Foundation (in the context of a maturity model), and the Currie et al. book (in the context of zombie servers) – which makes me think I might have listened to this video before. Charles makes really interesting points about the importance of testing, server choices, and benchmarks. A really helpful point is that it is hard to carry out measurements, which means we must make use of ‘proxies’.
The Price of Pixels: Unmasking the Environmental Impact of Our Digital Lives by Ian Mudway
Although not as technical as Charles’ talk, Ian’s talk is engaging and persuasive. Early on in his talk, he shares a thought provoking opinion: ‘If you update your laptop every two years… you are committing an ecological crime’, referring to the embodied carbon that it contains (the energy that has gone into its manufacture).
Books
Here are two technical books, both are available through the OU library (if you’re a student or a member of staff). The first one is mentioned by Humble:
Currie, A., Hsu, S. and Bergman, S. (2024) Building green software : a sustainable approach to software development and operations. O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Turning to an earlier book, and one that is referenced within TM354 Software Engineering:
Bass, L, Clements, P. and Kazman, R. (2021) Software Architecture in Practice, 4th Edition. Addison-Wesley Professional.
Although Bass’s book is not specifically about environmental computing or green code, the Energy Efficiency section, which can be found in part II of his textbook is particularly interesting.
Turning to a different type of book, I do recommend:
Pitron, G. (2023) The Dark Cloud: How the digital world is costing the earth. Scribe.
This one is a bit of an eye opener, but it directly relates to the themes presented within the videos.
Finally, I have two on my To Be Read (TBR) pile:
Siddharth, K. (2023) Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. St. Martin’s Press.
This book is mentioned by Mudway. This speaks to wider and very significant issues, including power, capitalism and colonialism.
Richards, H. (2024) Not the End of the World. Vintage.
This is mentioned in the Charles Humble video, but I first learnt about it by browsing through a bookshop.
Podcasts
There are not many podcasts available on this topic. The Climatestack podcast mentioned in Charles Humble’s lecture appears to have disappeared.
A good podcast for software developers and engineers is the IEEE Software Engineering Radio series. It is notable that sustainability and green software development is conspicuous by its absence. There is, however, one notable podcast: SE Radio 597: Coral Calero Muñoz and Félix García on Green Software. Notably, the point of how software is built, is highlighted, not only that the impact of a built product might be.
Articles
Here are a list of articles that I’ve found particularly interesting:
Lago, P. et al. (2021) ‘Designing for Sustainability: Lessons Learned from Four Industrial Projects’. In: Kamilaris, A., Wohlgemuth, V., Karatzas, K., Athanasiadis, I.N. (eds) Advances and New Trends in Environmental Informatics. Progress in IS. Springer, Cham. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61969-5_1
Manotas, I. et al. (2016) 'An Empirical Study of Practitioners' Perspectives on Green Software Engineering. IEEE/ACM 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). 14-22 May 2016. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/2884781.2884810
Moreira, A. et al. (2025) ‘A Roadmap for Integrating Sustainability into Software Engineering Education’. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Vol. 34 (5). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3708526
Pereira, R. et al. (2021) ‘Ranking programming languages by energy efficiency’, Science of Computer Programming. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2021.102609
Verdecchia, R. et al. (2021) 'Green IT and Green Software', IEEE software, Vol. 38 (6), pp.7-15. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2021.3102254
Wolfram, N. et al. (2018) 'Sustainability in software engineering'. Sustainable Internet and ICT for Sustainability (SustainIT). 06-07 December 2017. Available at: https://doi.org/10.23919/SustainIT.2017.8379798
Reflections
When you begin to study this topic, you soon realise there are so many other subjects that demand attention. Looking immediately within software engineering and software development, we can see the importance and significance of ethics. Look a little further, we found ourselves studying rich domains of sociology and politics.
Whilst writing this post, I did have a quick look at the current version of the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge. I was struck that it contained very little about environmental computing. It mentioned sustainability, but in terms of the longevity and flexibility of engineered systems, rather than environmental sustainability.
One key theme is clearly evident: the importance of measurement. It is perhaps no surprise that a number of measurement or modelling tools have been built. Knowing about the diversity of these tools immediately provokes a number of research questions, such as ‘how are they different from each other?’, ‘what exactly do they measure?’ and ‘to what extent are they appropriate or useful for certain types of software system?’
The more I look into this subject, the more I find there is to read.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are given to Michael Snowden, Andrea Davanzo and Ian Kennedy for making me aware of some of the resources that are featured in this post.