Supporting sustainability with software - an industrial perspective (keynote)

Abstract

Supporting sustainability with software is often summed up in the expression â Green ITâ and directly relates to the reduction of CO2 emissions and energy used by IT. The amount of CO2 used in the IT industry covers 2\% of the overall CO2 emissions. â Green by ITâ describes the influence of appropriate software to the remaining 98\% of the industry. We estimate that the effect of our sustainability related software on our customersâ CO2 footprint could be 10.000 times higher than our own. The so called triple bottom line defines sustainability as covering economic, ecological, and social aspects and the dependencies between. Based on this definition of sustainability, software could not only focus on green house gas reduction. Other topics like: consumersâ protection, sustainable supply, reduction of emission (air, water, waste), recycling, human recourse management and intelligent energy usage must be as well focus areas supported by software. At last software industry should not only focus on delivering tools for life cycle assessment (LCA), we should use it and provide a LCA for our software self. The industrial question is how to increase short and long term profitability by holistically managing economic, social and environmental risks and opportunities supported by software.