"We are 100% convinced that IT sustainability matters but we can’t add more non business requirements, we have agile teams." This often heard sentence from product managers or CPOs, led to this dedicated episode on agility and sustainability where host Gaël Duez welcomes 2 seasoned agile coaches: Joanne Stone, the founder of Agilist 4 planet and the We Hope Magazine, and Joanna Masraff, co-organiser of the the Agilists4Sustainability meetup group, and the Agilists4Planet conference. In this interview, filled with positive energy, they covered:    🛠️ Sustainability twisted technics,   🏃 Urgency vs sustainable pace of transformation,    🎯 Objectives or Key Results when incorporating Sustainability into OKR framework,    🎬 How to kick start sustainability transformation,    🔥 The importance of passionate people and influencers,    🧙 Agile coaches as alchemists of change.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO Singapore is on April 16th and our next stop is in New York on May 15th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 Learn more about our guest and connect: Joanna's LinkedInJoanne’s LinkedInGaël's website Green IO website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Joanna and Joanne’s sources and other references mentioned in this episodeAgilist4Planet Agile Alliance sustainability initiative and Agile Sustainability manifestoWe hope magazineSustainability incubator project (SIPS) Green Software FoundationTranscript Joanna Masraff (00:01)I think this is where sustainable thinking actually comes in we're very used to thinking very specifically about the problem, about the solution that we're trying to do, but actually, we need to take that step backward and think wider, more holistically about both the problem and the solution space, maybe slower thinking is needed rather than all this now, now, now, right?Gaël Duez (00:24)Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Every two Tuesdays, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.We are 100% convinced that IT sustainability matters, but we can't add more non-business requirements, and have agile teams. How many times did I hear this from product managers, CPOs or tech leads, not really knowing how to move from awareness to action? So it has been a while since I wanted to have a dedicated episode on agility and sustainability. And when Marjolaine Pillon pointed me into the direction of Agilist for Planets, I gladly connected with Johan and then Johanna about their work which was perfectly aligned with those questions. Joanne Stone is the founder of Agilist for Planet and founder also of the We Hope magazine. She has more than 30 years of experience in IT and was an early adopter of agile practices. She lives in Brooklyn, Ontario, Canada. And Joanna Masraff is one of her very early adopters.Jo's journey in the agile world is marked by her role in co-organizing the Agilist for Sustainability meetup group and the Agilist for Planet conference. to be honest, sustainability has been part of a professional journey almost from the beginning with other topics such as inclusivity and equity. And she's also a co-founder of Green PO in the UK. I have also to tell you that I'm recovering from a pretty bad cold, so my voice is a disaster. But the great news about this episode is I'm not going to be the one talking as usual, so my guests will do. And anyway, I'm delighted to have them on the show. Welcome, Joanne. Welcome, Joanna.Joanne Stone (02:33)Thank you. Glad to be here.Joanna Masraff (02:34)Thank you very much for having us.Gaël Duez (02:37)Glad that we've eventually managed to have this recording.Joanne Stone (02:40)Yes.Gaël Duez (02:43)So maybe starting with the basics, you are both part of the Agilist for Sustainability group. is this group about and what is this NGO Agilist for Planet about?Joanne Stone (02:55)Go, go,Joanna Masraff (02:56)So Sustainability came about actually due to the XP 2023 conference because they had, was the first agile conference that we were aware of that had a sustainability track. So suddenly the group of us who were already working on agile sustainability got together and said, right, we're speaking at this conference. Let's gather ourselves together and let's actually create a group, a community because we have more, we know of a lot of people who are trying to do this work. So why not create a group to share the learnings that we're going through, the things that we're finding out, the things that we're trying, the experiments that are working, that aren't working. And so Agilent for Sustainability group was born. But before that, we actually had Agility Impact, which Joe Stone started. So do you want to tell us a little bit about that?Joanne Stone (03:52)I guess I'll start off with Lisa Atkins has been very much a big supporter in terms of sustainability and Agilist and sustainability. if you're not familiar with her, she's done a lot of really great work in Agile coaching teams. She knew that basically from an agility perspective that us, Agiles, could do more She felt that we can work in certain disaster areas All over the world and at that point time when I was talking to her about it. This is when the Australian fires were actually happening and I got really curious as to how Agilist can actually be part some of these climate-affected changes and like how can we actually be part of something like that? And so I started basically interviewing tons of people all over the world. And Lisa kept on kind of like carrying this torch about how could we, how can we actually bring Agility, Agile Coaches in Sustainability. What she did then is she had been, I think she'd been tapping into a lot of people, a lot of stories all over the world. And she started a keynote panel back in 2022 in Nashville. And that got a group of people together and Yuda Eckstein who's been doing this work for a lot longer than a bunch of us have. She was there and we just kind of like started to get introduced to others who were doing that. And then the, so basically what we wanted to do and Joe was actually starting to talk about as well is bring this awareness of the work that great people are doing all over the world. So we met at the XP conference, and we just kind of like kept collecting their incredible, incredible stories of what they've done by using agility and with sustainability. So whether that's economic or environmental, we would say. And it's incredible the amount of people that are actually doing some of this work right now.Gaël Duez (05:54)And that's an interesting question because you mentioned some examples coming from using agility with a Tech for a good angle. And we tend here to focus quite a lot on green IT, which means making sure that IT teams and product teams in do take into consideration in the way that produce the IT services, produce the digital products.some sustainability principles. how do you see the connection between agile and sustainability? And maybe it goes both ways. So could you elaborate a bit on it?Joanna Masraff (06:30)the way that I'm coining it now, which I think really works and everybody, as soon as I say it, they're like light bulb, right? Is that Agile has been bringing social sustainability to the workplace since it started. So if you think about Agile's true mindset underneath it all, which is what true Agilists talk about, if you know what mean, it's really about bringing collaboration, communication, and the people to allow divergent thoughts and divergence in people to be included within the solution, to allow everybody their own space to be who they are within the team that they work in. So really, this is the bottom line social sustainability within the workplace. So that link, that connection between Agile and sustainability, at least on the social side, has always been there. So it's really a case of expanding origin into the kind of economics and environmental spaces within sustainability.Gaël Duez (07:33)I love the idea that it's in the DNA of agility to embrace sustainably at least the social angle I've never considered it that way. But it makes perfect sense when you see how rooted in human focus values, I would say the agile principles and the mindset of agility is. So now how did you manage to onboard into it, also the environmental aspect of it?Joanna Masraff (08:00)So the way we see it and what we've had people try out, not many, let's be fair. This is very still kind of experimental stage, but we have had teams and people who inject sustainability into every technique that they use within the team. So I call it the sustainability twisted techniques. So for example, if we take Scrum, you can inject a sustainability goal into your product goal, into your sprint goal, into your definition of done, into your definition of ready. know, into every single user story that you have in your backlog, there can be an item that determines the metric that you're using to measure the sustainability of this piece of work, which you as a team have chosen beforehand. Or even taking it a step slightly higher, you can think about your team charter. What you as a team agree, matches to you when you start working as a team or at any point, working in a team, you can say, stop, really this it matters a lot to me. Let's inject this into into the DNA of what we do as a team. What we found though, which is quite interesting is that a lot of people are still in that awareness stage. They're not quite at that stage where they're ready to think about how they measure their carbon footprint off their software, which I'm sure, I mean, the people who are listening, you are the forerunners, right? So you're trying to help the rest of your teams get on board with what you're trying to do, I'm sure. So what we find is that a lot of teams start with something like accessibility in the sustainability arena, which is a bit sad for accessibility, because how long have they been knocking on the door saying, let's be more accessible? However, at least they're starting with something, right?So it's interesting when we start talking about sustainability, especially when we start talking to product people, they think about the social sustainability angle much more readily than they do think about how they can make their products more environmentally sustainable. So this is where actually GreenPO work is kind of based in that space of raising the awareness as to what environmental sustainability and digital product means. And also how they can inject it into all of their processes and techniques that they're already using.Gaël Duez (10:23)A lot to unpack here. And I would love to ask you two questions, and they may be bit interconnected. The first one is, can you share some concrete example regarding the carbon footprint, regarding all the environmental footprint, or how you can create this, quoting you, agility twisted techniques, just to illustrate and to make it concrete what you've suggested. I really love the term actually. And the other question is, as you rightfully said, most of the teams, most of the company, they're still in awareness phase, sometimes even early awareness phase. So how would they kickstart with this techniques?Joanna Masraff (11:07)Sure. So concrete examples with regards to carbon footprint. We had a team who are measuring the carbon of their product. And so what they did is they injected that into their OKRs basically. So their overall goals for their year was to reduce the carbon impact of their products, which they managed to do just by having OKRs. I don't have specific numbers I can give you, but I do know that they did manage to reduce the overall impact of their product by injecting it just into their OKRs. However, on the other side, have had members of our meetup group, and Joe can talk more about this, I'm sure, who they tried to start it. They brought up the question in a retrospective, for example, and everybody was like, is that a thing? I didn't know that was a thing. I don't know how to do that. But she kept bringing up the question. And eventually what happened is that in the company, she found the other passionate individuals and they grouped together and they had a hackathon on it. So they had a hackathon on digital sustainability and the carbon footprint of their products. And they were able to figure out how to start measuring the impact of their product from a hackathon. So it's not a quick win. It's not, let's talk about this and something immediately happens, of course. But we have had quite a lot of our members kind of tell us of their stories, their struggles actually, and how they overcame them. You know, the continuous resilience towards the lack of knowledge and lack of awareness and how they kept pushing towards it becoming a part of the team's work.Gaël Duez (13:02)And Joanne, this is also the approach that you see quite a lot or  got different storiesJoanne Stone (13:08)for me, it is about bringing the the planet into the conversations with the specific teams. So how can we bring that that conversation in so people can start figuring out how best to do some of this work. we trust the teams. Like we trust that there is a lot of intelligence within the teams that they can figure this out or figure out what is really super important for them. you know, those conversations can lead to towards concrete things that the team itself will actually do. And this could change from one team to another. think within some of the stories that we share, which is, which some of the agile coaches will do is we'll work with some of the leaders as well. So one of the big things is that we're in an entire system and that system is actually sometimes controlled by the shareholders or by the performance management, by the accounting and how they have to report on all the different stats, right? A lot of things are driven outside of the teams, is, can be really, you know, it's scary in a way, especially if you want to, you feel that you want to make a what we found is that some of the coaches that we're working with in the story with Carolyn's wife is probably one of them. Like she, she worked with some of the executives to start repositioning their purpose of the vision or their why.Joanne Stone (14:38)so that it's not profit over planet, but it's planet over profit. And so she got that as part of their strategy, So it started to become embedded within the actual culture of the organization. And those are really cool, because if you start embedding it within the culture of the organization, it then to come down to the team perspective. And we have something more than just a recycling program. I think what I find in what I get really frustrated about and I mean we have beautiful people on the ground We have developers we have coaches. We have so many people that are out there that really want to truly make a difference But yet they're stuck within this sort of like container and unable to control and do what they would like to be able to do Right, so it's really quite frustratingGaël Duez (15:27)That's a very interesting comment because I wanted to ask a question to Joanna about when she mentioned OKR, if it was the O or the KR. And actually what you described is really the O, the objective. The overall objective is putting planet over profit, which is a conversation that hopefully will happen in many, companies in the next years, but honestly, that doesn't necessarily happen a lot. And I was about to ask a question to Joanna about the KR, which is that even if the objectives are not, you know, focused a lot on the planet, is there some leeway to do things, playing a bit with the key results, whether it's, I don't know, incorporating in the design phase, for the definition of ready, a person, with other metrics? Because we know that we talk a lot about carbon footprint since the beginning of the episode, but it's not always easy to measure carbon footprint. You could try maybe to make sure that any devices older than six years would still work on it or whatever. You've got different approaches. So my question first to you, Joanne, is do you believe that it's necessary to tackle the O first and that there is not that much room for key results or even in a regular company, in a company really focusing on making money at almost any cost an agilist can find some way to incorporate a bit of sustainability in their practices?Joanne Stone (17:05)It's where I think this is why Agile is, we've got a lot of background in terms of doing transformations, right? So what typically happens is we have a lot of people on the bottom level that really want to adopt this thing, right? So I don't care. It's Agile, AI, whatever the flavor of the day is, right? Really passionate about wanting to do this. And right now the passion in my mind is all around climate sustainability, right? And people are frustrated and wanting to do it. So the way that we've seen this work is like a bottom-up and top-down approach, right? yes, it's great if you can get the whole organization, if you're Patagonia, right? And you're able to do this through in, throughout. Right? The cultures change. It's beautiful. But we know that there's two different ways. Agilent, we always wanted it to be done from the top down because we know that that's where the biggest impact will be. And it'll be a lot faster if it's adopted from there. Because then all the systems that are required to support, you know, the objectives and it be passed down straight to the team. reality is that doesn't happen. Right? So it really has to start from the two different spots.But I think from the bottom up, this is where your tech community is super smart. So they know that there is front end changes that they can make, the back end changes that they can make. They know that they can make changes at a lot of different levels. And so really it's back to them. I would be going at the team level having the first step as to what discussions do we want to have? Modify the product in whatever way that we feel that we can make it greener. If we don't know, can we research it? Can we come to podcasts like this, where I can figure out different ways? I was listening to one of your podcasts around how do you balance the energy, basically, and where can we host some of the servers so that it's more greener? And that was so brilliant. I think we have to go out and we have to figure out the different ways and different parts of our applications to make greener. But it could just start with a bunch of different ideas, a backlog, something that we can then incorporate every single sprint and then ask the question though, because from an agility perspective is how will we know it will work? So it is one of those things where we create experiments where we kind of look at and try and figure out what the results are that we want. So we run that experiment every single sprint to kind of see whether or not the results, we're gonna get the results and then we reflect on it and figure out where we need to go next after we've learned it. So that's the way that I would sit there and approach it. I don't think there's any concrete kind of way in terms of we start here in the front end or the back end or whatever the case may be from a tech perspective. I think you have to work with the team and the team's expertise and start getting them excited about doing this and start including it as part of the backlog so that they can start working on it. So that's the way I would kind of approach it.Gaël Duez (20:21)It's a great reminder that agility is about experimenting things and that we don't have necessarily to change the definition of ready or the definition of done, whatever, so my question might be to you, Joanna, is like, what kind of experiments did you experience in the different coaching situations that you've been doing?Joanne Stone (20:25)Yeah.Joanna Masraff (20:44)Yeah, absolutely. can I just jump and answer a little bit of the other question first, if that's okay. So just to bust a myth a little bit, because one of the things that you said, struck a chord was, you know, what key result can you use? Yeah. And actually cost generally you can use. So if you reduce your cost, you are making your digital product more sustainable.Gaël Duez (20:50)Be my guest.Joanna Masraff (21:12)So, and that is one of the ones which is a win-win-win, let's be fair. It's a win for the people who are interested, a win for the company, and it's a win for the planet. there's lots of studies out there that are ongoing and information you can get to show that being sustainable is profitable. So if you have some stakeholders who are, you're trying to talk about sustainability and they're coming back and saying, we don't want to do it or whatever, you can go to them and you can say, do you want to save money? Because this will save you money. Whether you care about the fact that we're destroying the world or not, that's up to you. But if you're only interested in money, then actually we can save you money by doing this. And I believe that that's actually one of the experiments that one of my coaches did was to actually look at their cloud costs as they reduced their energy use rather than trying to translate it directly to carbon. Because let's be fair, I'm sure most of your audience are aware that the figures that you get on our hyper scalers and our cloud providers are not correct when it comes to their emissions. So instead of looking at that, they actually chose energy. They reduce their energy usage a variety of different ways and managed to reduce their cloud costs as well.That's just kind of one of the experiments I can remember off the of my head. So it's thinking about who are your stakeholders? What might they be interested in seeing and therefore setting up your experiments so you're not just kind of satisfying your own curiosity, but also you can help push the agenda for the planet towards your stakeholders as well. and I think this is where… sustainable thinking actually comes in we're very used to thinking very specifically about the problem, about the solution that we're trying to do, but actually we need to take that step backwards and think wider, more holistically about both the problem and the solution space, maybe slower thinking is needed rather than all this now, now, now, right? And now I've forgotten the second question that you had.Gaël Duez (23:21)Let's put it another way. If I'm an agile coach, seriously convinced about the sustainability challenge and starting to work with an average team, not like climate denier, but not people waking up every morning thinking, how am I going to save the planet? Okay. Just average, nice folks. What kind of ideas should I put on the table for them to start thinking about it?Joanna Masraff (23:45)Yes, it's a great question. And I'm a little bit stumped by it, be fair. So in my mind, this brings us back to awareness, because it always starts with the awareness. one of the things that we've done at Anne Digital, so this is not a team level, this is more thinking about… and just to kind of go backwards a little as well is what you'll find, especially in Europe especially, is that a lot of companies do actually have something in their strategy now, which relates either to sustainability, net zero policies, or even responsible business, which is such a wonderful phrase, isn't it? Here's sarcasm. So maybe take that bit out because I might get fired.Joanne Stone (24:34)HAHAHAHAGaël Duez (24:35)Keep it, but I will use AI a to mask your voice. And nobody will ever know if this is you.Joanna Masraff (24:43)That's it.Gaël Duez (24:45)So you see I've got a use case for AI.Joanne Stone (24:47)Hahaha.Joanna Masraff (24:48)Nice. So yeah, we're finding a lot of companies, especially in Europe, because of the new regulations, you know, they have some form of sustainability within their strategy. But there was some quote, I think it might have been Reuters that came out with it, which said something like, I'm going to forget the numbers. So I'm going to have to check it for you. it's 65 % of those businesses that have it in their strategy have no idea how to action that strategy. So they have it up there, but they think, you know, your recycling policies or cycle to work policies or, you know, electric car policies and things like this are going to solve that problem for it where of course it's not going to. So this is where you start with the start of your company's sustainable transformation where we believe you need your agile coaches.What we did and digital is we started with an awareness week. So sustainability and inspiration week. We had various speakers from both inside the company and outside the company come and tell whoever wanted to attend to tell them about different aspects of digital sustainability. So it was one week this year and over 10 % of the company decided to come along off their own back, which was excellent. But we didn't stop with awareness. What we did then is we took that and we created an action week. So the action week was basically a discovery split over two days to allow people to come and take all this awareness that they had established and determine a very high level roadmap for the company as to how we can become more sustainable and create more sustainable products. So instead of it being, you know, completely a top down transformation, which we know, again, if you force change upon people, it doesn't work. What we did is we brought the strategy together with the passionate people at the bottom who were interested in what to change and how to make this change. So we created this high level roadmap. And one of the top items that everybody came out with was upskilling. So training for every different capability within the business.So we're currently creating that training material internally, again, because then you have internal experts on specific areas that the rest of your company can go to. However, of course, there are specific people who are doing digital sustainability training that you can reach out to. But we're in the middle of creating these training sets among the different capabilities so that each different capability, starting with those who are interested, and then of course it will become mandatory as the company take on new policies and regulations. But everybody's going to end up going through this, but we start with the passionate people, the people who want to, so we're not forcing change upon them. We use those people as the influencers, the proud shouters of, I did this. You know, it was cool. I learned some really new stuff that was wonderful. You you use the power of the people rather than the power of command.Gaël Duez (28:09)But then it takes quite a lot of time mean, let me play a bit the devil advocates here, but basically this company had an awareness week, which then lead to an action week, which then lead to, we need to train people. And sorry to be a bit provocative here, but there is not a single gram of CO2 or water or material or whatever that has been saved so far. Am I right? Or they also managed to get some quick actions.Joanna Masraff (28:37)Well, the quick action was the CTO realized that he needed to clean up the cloud space. So that was great. I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but I know that that's what he, scooted off quickly to when he had that awareness as to how much money again, that he was losing because of the unsustainable practices with how we were using cloud. He was like, yes, we have to adopt this.Gaël Duez (28:42)Okay, that's good.Joanna Masraff (29:05)So we made a, not a denier, but maybe not a huge supporter, a bigger supporter, and we cleaned up our clouds. So not as much as I would like, and yes, it's a lot slower and I grind my teeth a lot, let's be fair. However, I believe it's the way to bring the people with us in the transformation.Joanne Stone (29:23)And I feel this urge of action, right? Like we gotta get in there and gotta do it, right? Because, know, the time is of the essence, right? And I think this is when we talk about agility, what I really like is the fact that we do these things at a sustainable pace so we don't burn ourselves out is one thing. the aspect of what Joe's,Joe's saying is how do we inspire people to get into action? How do we get more people on board? what's the minimal amount of energy that we need to expand on to kind of get that going, right? That is indeed an approach where you can, you know, get everybody, the people who really want to be able to do, bring them all together in a room, talk about it, figure out exactly what we need to do and then start creating the plan. You know, get the leaders on board, know, realize that they made this, you know, my gosh, this is, this is the, this is the mess that we've created. You know, that, that starts to inspire people to get into action as well. But I think when you're asking the question, like I have a team, I'm an Agile coach, I don't care, Agile coach, Agile leader, person X, right? I want to do more work in from a sustainability, right, or to makeJoanne Stone (30:37)like from a climate perspective or environment perspective, I want to improve what we're doing right now. And the thing that I've heard in and out of all the conversations that we've been interviewing people is the Green Software Foundation. So what Joe was saying, I think you were talking about this before too, but this is aspect of bringing in knowledge or awareness. You know as a team I might come in there and go, hey guys, let's just, why don't we go to the Green Software Foundation and learn exactly what's there. Take a course, one of us take it, let's do it on one of our learning days or whatever the case may be so that we can learn more as to how we can actually apply this. So that would be potentially a place where I would start, how we as coaches work, we're known to utilize and empower the team, right? So, the word, not the, it's been overused a huge amount of time. But within that is like, we know that we don't have all the knowledge, right? But we can point them into different directions. But starts within the team itself. So, either they have the knowledge or we have to there's a quest for knowledge, right? So it's like, we gotta learn more. Okay, where would you start? Software foundations. Okay, let's go there, right? But I would actually, for me, always starting with the team, having a conversation, putting it out there. What do you guys feel about this? Do you guys wanna do something about this? Can we try something about this, right? And then just start it, like those conversations, know, week over week when we're building the backlog or planning out what we need to do next. would do that. And if I was a leader, a manager or something like that, I would work with the team to go, okay, will be our objectives? How do we wanna measure this? How do we know we're successful at it? I would be, let's try and improve our product by, or improve our product, or basically let's ensure that 20 % of the stories that are coming in every week, it has to do with sustainability, right?So I would do something like that. So it would encourage the team to actually start taking on the work. We did this, by the way, with DevOps and tech debt before in the past. And it was one way to allow for space for the team to actually do that work, which is really important because it's hard to stop doing the product work that we need to do right now. So someone has to create the space for the team to actually do that work.So by giving it like 20 % or whatever the case may be is a great way of allowing for that space for that team to actually create some of that work. But I would definitely be starting off with that conversation.Gaël Duez (33:29)And if I try to wrap up what you've both said, it's old story again, because it's all about raising awareness, getting some training, empowering teams. as you say, Joanne, starting the conversation. Having at some point middle management some space, that's crucial here because otherwise… You know, the good intentions are squeezed between the bottom of the top down approach, but hey, it's middle manager most of the time who have the key to truly kickstart and even ramp up more than kickstart ramp up things. So is there anything specific about sustainability and more specifically environmental impacts in this discussion or is it? Quite similar to how we had to incorporate cyber security, inclusivity, or accessibility, as you mentioned. Is there anything specific to the environmental topics when it comes to onboarding them into agile practices?Joanna Masraff (34:31)The only thing I is back to the thing that with all of those other things you've mentioned, it hasn't been a cost saving. So that one thing generally makes it easier to bring your middle managers in because their bottom line usually is cost. Apart from that, the transformation itself, it's really not that different, which is why...Gaël Duez (34:42)Okay.Joanna Masraff (34:56)We brought Agile and sustainability and Agilist and sustainability together because we, you somebody called us, a friend of ours called Agile Coaches, the, the alchemists of change, which I really liked. So that's why I'm using it. So we really are change makers. We know how to come in and help make those changes. And I believe in JoJo's, the two Jo's minds, the next transformation is the sustainability transformation. And we can help with that. We want to help with that.Joanne Stone (35:35)And the reason why is because I look at all of these particular problems and challenges as wicked challenges. So and when you look at the definition of a wicked problem, right, like it's like something where, you know, we have many stakeholders, many different symptoms of the specific problem, many different solutions, right? There isn't one specific expert that knows how to do that. You need to have a diversified team in order to solve it. You, the only way that you can actually work on it is through small little experiments where you iterate and adapt, there isn't a linear way that we can actually tackle that problem. So the problems and challenges that we have today are all wicked, very much wicked. And the practices of Agile are perfectly suited to this space because we're utilizing the collaboration of the team. We have to empower the team because we experiment, because we have to slice things into small little things.And we also have to do this at a sustainable pace because these problems won't be solved in our lifetimes, right? It'll be solved in multiple lifetimes. So we need to be able to do it in a way where we can thrive and be resilient at doing that. So that sustainable pace and the way that we've been doing things from an agility perspective has set us up to be able to work on these particular wicked problems. The cool thing though, The ability to kind of like what Joe was saying in terms of cost reduction, we can totally make that transparent, right? you know, we're all about outcome basis and producing the value and making sure that we do it in the most effective and efficient way, right? With people. And we're all about doing, not actually about planning forever. We're into doing action. but in a sustainable pace way, using the word sustainable from that perspective.Gaël Duez (37:39)And I really enjoy the way you wrap it up because I won't have to do it in the conclusion, but also because it's sort of a reassuring that if I'm an agile coach, if I'm a product manager with a good grasp of agile techniques, actually all my tools are not to be challenged. And that's a bit reassuring. You say it's like, okay, so I've got this extra burden But you know, my way of thinking, my way of working, the agile practices that I've honed over time, they're there. I don't have to challenge them. It's just yet another issue, yet another wicked challenges, as you said, that I need to incorporate in into my way of working and I don't know, I find it reassuring. Even if you say that problems will not be solved over a lifetime, it's still, at least this, don't need to change how I work. I just need to incorporate this question and these challenges in a, well-crafted way of working, Am I right also to see it in such a positive way?Joanne Stone (38:46)I would say that the one thing I would add, because I struggled with this too, is how do we bring the planet into what we're doing? there's so many great practices that we can learn from the sustainable area, for sure. Circular economy, doughnut economy, regenerative. There's so many beautiful things that the sustainability experts in this world have been doing.And those things are not incorporated in our practices. So I say, on to our practices and bring together all the other sustainability practices which are out there and how we think about how do we reduce the waste.Joanna Masraff (39:26)I agree and disagree with Joe, because I think, yes, of course the sustainability has added ways of thinking about our product and about the economy, which bring the planet further in. But I don't think the changes that we may need to make to our techniques are… big, if at all. So this is why I call them the twisted techniques, right? And you've mentioned some of the ideas, you know, bringing in Maria Len, Planet as a stakeholder. So that idea can actually be added to a lot of our design techniques that we already use in the product space, right? So your customer journey mapping have a persona who is nature, for example, this can also be applied into your product techniques your and delivery phases.Gaël Duez (40:14)Really interesting. Thanks a lot, Joanna, for adding this other perspective. There is one angle that we didn't discuss that much is putting things the other way around, which is not usually what Green IO does, but it's also make a bit of sense to have this other perspective, the two of you, you work on, you know, agile for sustainability rather than sustainable for agile. have you been using agile techniques to accelerate projects, even if they're not like in IT per se, and even if it's not about reducing the environmental footprint of the structure using them? Because I think that, Johan, when we had early discussions, you mentioned something was a food bank, am I right?Joanne Stone (40:58)Yeah, love to experiment, right? So one of the things that we started to do was work with our local communities. So my first experiment was, OK, let's get in there and try and see if I can work with this restaurant owner who wants to make the restaurant more sustainable. so I brought a team together and I thought, okay, let's just do a little small little slice of that particular problem we can figure it out. But we took about two months of just discussing what sustainability is. this is where, you know, we went, okay, like, is there another practice? Like, what other tool I pull from my backpack? And so one of my friends is a design sprint facilitator, And so what we did is we utilized the design sprint techniques. We found this beautiful, passionate lady not too far away from me who has a local community garden. And she says, well, you know, I have a problem right now. I want to get more volunteers in because I want to produce more food. And if we can produce more food, I can give more food to local food bank. We went, sure, OK, let's try this thing out. So we did the design sprint. And so we have people from all over the world. And they come in. And we interviewed the clients. We interviewed the subject matter experts.Gaël Duez (42:12)Excellent.Joanne Stone (42:22)You know, we had a huge amount of problems and challenges. had stickies like galore of the problems. We sliced it down. We got it into what is a small specific thing that we can do. We created a prototype, right? So we created a flyer would bring in more volunteers, that would attract more volunteers. We tested it out, and then we provided that data back. So this is us in action. Like, Gaël I cannot believe how this is. I don't want to overanalyze. I don't want to blah, blah. But Google and the technique that they have for doing design sprints is Bella. It's brilliant. It's beautiful because it's done within 32 hours. And it has the only interview so many people. You only get just enough information. So that you can test it out, so you can figure out what to do next. So we call it SIPs, Sustainability Incubator Projects. we're SIPsters. yeah. And it was a bunch of women who were actually doing it. So it's been amazing what we're doing. Like I am really excited about it. But back to your point where we talking about earlier, and you brought it up, Gaël.Gaël Duez (43:31)Got it.Joanne Stone (43:41)We have as Agilist a lot of these beautiful skills it's not just scrum like it's not just Kanban right we've done change management we've changed culture we develop software right and it allows us to get right in there roll up our sleeves make a change make see something and then and then allow people to figure out and learn what to do next. By the way, it's been amazing. The success stories are great, and I get paid in hugs and drinks. So I'm really super happy right now. But it's lots of fun, and the people that are with this right now really enjoy it, and they want us to continue to do more.Gaël Duez (44:25)Agilist, get paid in hugs and beers or drinks, Join the sustainability space. Okay. It's excellent, but it's also a good illustration that you can use agile techniques also for doing tech for goodJoanne Stone (44:28)Hiya! Hahaha!Gaël Duez (44:41)Being mindful of your time, I'd like to wrap up. mean, you've beautifully wrapped it up, Joanne, so I'm not going to add on what you've said, but just maybe, is there any resources that you didn't share or that you want to mention?Joanna Masraff (44:56)So the Agile Alliance actually has a sustainability initiative and they created a sustainability manifesto, which is really quite also, Ines Garcia is recording conversations with all of the signatories to try and spread the word that we do have an Agile sustainability manifesto.Gaël Duez (45:00)Okay.Joanna Masraff (45:17)So it's well worth people going and having a look at that. even if you don't agree with it, come and discuss it with us, you know, we'd love to have that conversation.Joanne Stone (45:25)Yeah, the resources that I feel would be really great is in the We Hope magazine. So there's some really amazing stories which are in there. We've just launched the last third edition. And it gets into some of the Agilists which are out there. They're doing different things from leadership to some of the projects that I've done in the past we have some tech people that are there as well. So I think that a lot of those stories that are there are a great, specific resource for people to actually look at as well.Joanne Stone (46:01)including what Joe just said, and that's Garcia's just doing some amazing, amazing work.Joanna Masraff (46:07)Interestingly, the We Hope magazine is on the Agilist for Planet website as well, that also still has, recordings of our old, the last two conferences. if you're interested, go and have a look, there's some great presentations on there. We touch into regeneration. We have the business case for sustainability. We talk about circularity, degrowth. We talk about cleaning up your digital space in your personal kind of digital space as well, your digital data. There's lots and lots and lots of different stuff on there. So please go and have aGaël Duez (46:42)That's a positive trend to close the podcast as well in this episode. So thanks a lot, both of you, for joining. It was really interesting to deep dive a bit more in the agile world and agilist world, which I'm not that familiar. I've used the techniques, but I've never been an agile coach. Thanks a lot for joining.Joanne Stone (47:00)Thank you.Joanna Masraff (47:00)Thank you so much for having us. Lovely to chat.Gaël Duez (47:04)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, share it and give us five stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. We are an independent media, relying solely on you to get more listeners. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with a colleague or a relative would be a nice move. Everyone deserves to get this energy booster than Joe and Joe provided during this interview.In our next episode, which will be quite technical, I will welcome Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki to talk about sustainability in cloud computing using new open source solutions for containers and orchestration in the Kubernetes world. Stay tuned. And one last thing, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. Singapore is in one month, and its full agenda is now available. New York is in two months, and many speakers have now been disclosed. As usual, you can get a free ticket on any Greenio conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP.Just make sure to have one before the 100 free tickets are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

Dawn Baker, CTO of Back Market, shares her expertise on sustainability and tech innovations. She discusses their significant switch from AWS to Google Cloud, driven by sustainability goals and the need for carbon measurement granularity. Dawn highlights the role of FinOps in promoting eco-friendly practices and the balance between carbon reduction and performance. The conversation also touches on integrating sustainability in disaster recovery plans and addressing e-waste challenges, showcasing Back Market’s mission-driven approach to GreenOps.

“Today I learned that we have a sustainability team.Thank you for your effort in this area, looking at results of the team so far, and the ROI of time invested, it's probably a good time to officially dissolve the team entirely”. In 3 sentences, almost 3 years of work from the WordPress Sustainability Group vanished and their Slack channel archived on the spot. To get clarity on what happened at WordPress and to understand what a WordPress practitioner can do to reduce the environmental footprint of her digital services, Gaël Duez welcomes 3 of the 4 founders of the original sustainability team: Csaba Varszegi, Nahuai Badiola, and Nora Ferreiros. In their much more nuanced exchange that could have been expected due to the current situation, they covered many topics including:    👏 The power of applause to kick start a sustainability team   🔧 How changing HTTPS check made WordPress save 471 kWh / month   🌱 The importance of having sustainability tools as close as possible to software practitioners tools   🏛️ The subtle art of creating a foundation while keeping control over it via intellectual property     🎁 How to “enforce” contribution in an open source community   And much more!❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conferences are in Singapore (April 16th) and New-York (May 15th). Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 Learn more about our guest and connect: Csaba Varszeg LinkedInNahuai Badiola LinkedIn Nora Ferreirós LinkedIn Green IO website Gaël Duez's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Our guests's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:WordPress Sustainability HandbookThe limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress created by Nahuai BadiolaThe Sustainability WordPress pluginWordPress Sustainability Team WordPress Foundation The W3C sustainability guidelines presented by Sustainable Web DesignClimateAction.TechThe grid-aware websites program of the Green Web FoundationTranscript (auto-generated)Csaba (00:00)So I was thinking to myself, I can try to do things on my own, but what is the impact of those things? So if we could contribute at a higher level, let's say, at WordPress level, that could have a lot larger impactGaël Duez (00:15)Hello, everyone. Welcome to Green IO. I'm Gaël Duez, and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech.Today, I learned that we have a sustainability team. Thank you for your effort in this area. Looking at results of the team so far and the return on investment of time invested, it's probably a good time to officially dissolve the team entirely. In three sentences, almost three years of work from the WordPress Sustainability Group vanished and their Slack channel was archived on the spot. It reminds me of the Elon Musk style when he arrived at Twitter, except that WordPress CMS still powers almost 40 % of all the websites around the globe, with many being heavy traffic websites. And with heavy traffic comes significant environmental impacts. So to get clarity on what happened at WordPress and to understand what a WordPress practitioner can do to reduce the environmental footprint of digital services now that the sustainability team is gone, I'm glad to welcome today three people who are active members of the WordPress community, especially on sustainability topics. Actually, they were part of the four founders of the original sustainability team.Csaba is a sustainable web designer based in Antwerp, Belgium. Nahuai is a freelance WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator. And Nora Ferreiros is a freelance UX UI designer.and both Nahuai and Nora are based in Barcelona. So welcome Csaba, Nahuai and Nora. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.Nahuai (02:49)Hello.Nora (02:49)Thank you.Csaba (02:50)Hello, hi.Nora (02:51)Thank you forNahuai (02:51)Yeah, thanks for having us.Csaba (02:52)Hi, hello.Gaël Duez (02:53)You'remore than welcome. So maybe before we start, could each of you share what is the main fact or figure that leads you to care about sustainability as a WordPress practitioner?Nora (03:09)Well, actually, Nahuai is the person who led me to care about sustainability in WordPress and in the details sustainability and life in general,Nahuai (03:20)That was super nice to hear, Nora. In my case, the eye-opening moment was a lightning talk by Roberto Vázquez in a work camp that just putting together the energy consumed by data centers and the environmental impact. It's pretty straightforward, but it was the first time that I it was like, okay, this makes sense.Gaël Duez (03:22)Now you have to deal with this.Nora (03:24)It's true.Nahuai (03:48)and I started to go down the rabbit hole. And short after that, I started to talk with Hannah Smith, who has been a key person in my sustainability journey. And yeah, pretty much in that point, I started to research and start giving talks about it. And yeah, probably.Nora (04:06)Yeah, have to say that I was in this talk also, but for me it was later. Nahuai was the one that said to me, look at this, sustainability is important, but I also was in this talk and it was important to me to think about internet consumes energy.Csaba (04:23)For me, it's a bit similar, just like you mentioned, and as you mentioned in the intro, like WordPress having a large market share. So I was thinking to myself, I can try to do things on my own, but what is the impact of those things? So if we could contribute at a higher level, let's say, at WordPress level, that could have a lot larger impact and maybe a lot more interesting for other people to...profit from as well.Gaël Duez (04:50)you're right, Shaba, that WordPress is just huge in terms of CMS share and I was delighted to hear about the creation of a sustainability team at WordPress. I've heard, but maybe I'm wrong, that it all started at a WordPress convention with Nora speaking up on these aspects, but maybe I'm completely wrong. Could you enlighten me a bit on this?Nora (05:16)Yeah, it was kind of this way and honestly it was kind of around the situation, it wasn't something planned because it all started at the WordCamp Europe in 2022. This is the annual big WordPress event in Europe and it was also my first international event and I was super excited and nervous because I was about to spend...four whole people who I only could communicate in English. I'm in Spanish, so you can imagine it is a little tricky. So I was talking one day, I was talking with Rocio Valdivia. She's a lead of global WordPress community programs. I had to read this because I have not been able to remember it. So she...Nahuai (05:49)youNora (06:03)blindly believing my newly acquired language skills. And she encouraged me to ask a question during this Q &A session with Matt Mullenberg and Joseph Heiden-Champonsy, who was the executive director of WordPress at the moment. So basically two of the most important people involved in the project at the time. And for some reason I said, yeah, sure, why not? But the thing is, as time passed,I started to panic because I had no idea what to ask about. So I turned to Nahuai and I asked him for help and he rightly suggests sustainability as a topic. So with this in mind, I knew, I yeah, I knew if I ask a general question like, what about sustainability? I would just...Nahuai (06:35)YouGaël Duez (06:36)Ha ha ha ha.Nora (06:56)get a polite non-committal answer like, cool that's interesting we will think about it, thank you. So I decided to directly ask them for a team or at least for a Slack channel and for whatever reason they went for the latter. So I did it and when I returned to my seat 18 people had already joined the channel and are rising but the funny thing is I never intended to.achieve this. My goal was just to, I don't know, get sustainability on the table or maybe use this visibility to draw some attention of some attendees interested in the topic and then maybe connect with them after the event or whatever. But things went unspectral differently and I'm very happy about it.After that, the four people that finally make the team work as a working group for a year and the next WordCamp Europe, we have the support of some amazing people and we could officially became a team. And this is the story. And I would clarify something. I think it's really important. I voiced the demand, but I'm pretty sure thatwas the people who cheer and applaud the thing, my suggestion. That main matter, and Joseph said, okay, let's create the channel because the people want something and we have to do something. So if any of the personnel listening to this, thank you very much for making it possible. And remember that voices lead, but it's the community that moves things forward.Gaël Duez (08:34)Power of applauseNora (08:36)Yeah.Csaba (08:36)Hehehe.Gaël Duez (08:37)so you wanted to put sustainability on the table. You actually managed to put sustainability within the Slack workspace of WordPress. Csaba, were you one of these people jumping on this newly created Slack channel?Csaba (08:55)I think I was actually one of the first people to join because I remember, I remember Nora asking this question, but the funny thing is that I was like kind of falling asleep during the question and answer, not because it wasn't interesting, but then I just heard the word sustainability. I was, what, what? So I started listening and then I heard that the channel was created. I think I was one of the first and I remember.Gaël Duez (08:59)Ha ha ha ha.Nahuai (09:06)ThankCsaba (09:21)Thijs was there as well and we already arranged something to meet during the conference, the after party, let's say, which we did as well. And the other funny thing is that I ran into Nora and Nahuai as well somewhere during a walk. So we actually really met in Porto and yeah, that's where things probably started up. still we had a long way to go.Gaël Duez (09:46)Yeah, the stars were aligned. And maybe for the non-adverted listeners, we talk a lot about the WordPress community at WordPress, but as far as I've understood, WordPress is an open source software, but there is also a company called WordPress. And when we talk about a sustainability team, a lot of people could believe maybe that you're employees atWordPress or some sort of WordPress company. could you maybe Nahuai you clarify a bit this ecosystemNahuai (10:16)Yeah.It is kind of tricky to make sense of it because of the naming. So I will try to keep it simple. you said, WordPress, the thing that we've been talking till now is the CMS, it's open source. And it has a vibrant community doing things because they believe on that open source and democratizing the publishing and everything that is behind the motto or the meaning of WordPress. But then after, and this was...co-founded by Matt Mullenberg and Mike Little. Shortly after this creation, Matt Mullenberg created the company Automatic. And Automatic owns WordPress.com, which is a huge confusion for a lot of people. So WordPress.com is just a hosting company using the CMS WordPress. And that's pretty much all the resemblance between the two of them.Gaël Duez (10:54)Mm-hmm.Nahuai (11:10)And the tricky part to make it a bit more difficult to understand is to the community, we are all volunteers. This is an open source, but some companies are putting people, sponsoring people to contribute. And Automatic was until one month ago, the one that was putting more people and time on it. It was around 4,000 hours in people, the sponsor, to move forward.So some of the teams that are in Make WordPress, that is how it's leader by people on automatic. Okay, because since they have a lot of people contributing, it's more than a hundred people. A lot of teams had someone from automatic having 40 hours week to put into there, which is super cool. The sustainability team...Gaël Duez (11:44)Hmm.Nahuai (11:58)we were a bit different in that sense because we were created in this special way as Nora explained. And the 14 reps were self-sponsored, meaning that we were putting our time because we believe in the CMS and in sustainability and then more people of course joined to the Slack and the meetings. But we were mainly people self-sponsored. There were also some sponsored by companies, butthe sustainability team was quite diverse in that sense. it was not run by, none of the teams are run by automatic, okay, just to be clear, but some teams have a lot of, or had a lot of people from automatic because one month ago, more or less, Matt decided to reduce the time that are putting back into the project. But this is because our legal,battle that we didn't discuss yet, so I don't want to go down there. I hope I made sense a bit of how it's organized.Gaël Duez (12:55)Okay.actually, thanks a lot because it's crystal clear. I didn't really understand what was automatic. And this is not the first time in the open source community that you have actually a software that is sort of maintained by a company, even if it's an open source software. you think about Redbut usually it's a bit clearer because they share the same name and sometimes the intellectual property is even clarified in that sense. Okay, got it. Thanks a lot. What did you do,Nora (13:31)Great question. when we make the team, they ask us to work on sustainability, not just on environmentalCsaba (13:31)Mm-hmm.Nora (13:39)sustainability but also in social and economic part of sustainability. SoWe have been working together with other working groups like Fight for the Future, for example, or the V Groups for Diversity. So we can together cover all the things because it was a big thing. And the original founders, we were more into environmental sustainability and it is the part we work more on. For example,we worked in a handbook for making WordPress events more sustainable. We published it. We were able to translate it to Spanish and to French.And we were actually working on making guidelines for creating a WordPress website in a more sustainable way. It was, for me, the more exciting project because we were making something similar to what W3C guidelines were making, but applied to WordPress.And we were also working in a plugin that I think Csaba and Nahuai can explain better about how it works to help on this about creating more sustainable WordPress websites.Csaba (14:57)Yes, wewere working on a plugin. Yes, plugins are like kind of extensions of WordPress, functional extensions of WordPress. And the plan was to create a canonical plugin, which means that it's supported by the community or even maybe on the long-term be included in core WordPress. So the WordPress software itself. And the idea was to spread awareness about digital sustainability to give people an idea about their websites in the sense of carbon footprints.And the two basic ideas were to surface whether the website was hosted on renewable energy and to measure the home page's weight and carbon footprint and to compare it with data from the website's carbon API, like compare it to other websites, other webpages measured and warn people if their homepage has a too large footprint. And of course give themfeedback or assist them how to improve it. And that's where the guidance part would comeNahuai (15:57)I wanted to point out as Nora said, we were collaborating with working groups, because this is the naming we are using in WordPress. And one of them was with the performance team, which are also working and job, by the way, reducingthe energy that is needed. And one of the things they did because of somehow the synergy between us was a saving, changing some technical part of how to check the HTTPS. But the number was like 471 kilowatts hour a month was saved because of the large market share of WordPress.our idea in the sustainability was to raise awareness. So maybe in the performance team, they are already doing great work to reduce the emissions.But our team, sorry, I have to laugh because our team is no longer alive. it's strange to phrase it this way, but I'm going to continue this way. So our team, the idea was to raise awareness of what the performance team was doing or create guidelines as Nora said. So it was not only reducing the CO2 or whatever, but...Nora (16:56)Yeah.Nahuai (17:15)is spreading the word of the impact that a website has.Gaël Duez (17:19)That's an important point because I was about to ask, but what about other environmental variables or what about using other proxy than just the web page weight? For instance, know, some other tool, they check the DOM size or they check the number of API call, et cetera. But I think if the main idea was really to raise awareness, the simpler you keep it, the better it is.correct to assume things that way.Csaba (17:50)Yes, I think so. funny enough, it's sometimes very hard to keep things simple or just give a quiet, good estimation on what's, what's wrong and what can, what people can do about it. so it wasn't a simple task.And I also have to note maybe that there is a site help feature of WordPress, which is quite a cool tool, which actually gives you information. does a couple of tests on your environment and gives you a couple of things you can improve for your website. And the idea was to include this.into that tool, is a native tool of WordPress Core itself,Gaël Duez (18:27)And today, the plugin that you developed, is it still available somewhere? even if it's not included in the core WordPress, but can anyone still use it?Csaba (18:39)Yes, it's not in the plugin repository, but you can download from GitHub. it probably should undergo a couple of refactoring, but you can try it and use it as it is now.Gaël Duez (18:50)and what were the feedback from the community?Nora (18:54)The feedback from the community, I was thinking about this thing you said about keep things simple. And it was really hard to keep things simple because people were to use two numbers, like what have you achieved? Numbers. And sustainability is kind of difficult to do that if you don't want to stay in the tunnel carbon.Gaël Duez (19:08)Hmm.Nora (19:18)so there were many people interested in I want to do something to make WordPress more sustainable but they were feeling really confused because the team didn't have many resources to make practical things so we were in a theoretical place most of the time creating awareness and so andI think people were interested, motivated, excited maybe, but confused about what they should do to make things more sustainable in a practical way.Nahuai (19:58)and having the aim of touching the three pillars of sustainability, the environmental, the social and the economic, made that even more difficult. Not that I didn't like it because I like the holistic point of view, but it was more difficult to communicate sometimes. So yeah, that didn't help to simplify. as Nora was stressing out, we movedslowly because we were self-sponsored people and that was also something to take into account. And we could just allocate maybe two, four hours a week, but not more because we are mostly freelancers and trying to make our own living. So that was also part of the thing that was not easy to balance, let's say.Csaba (20:42)Also, I think it's important to add that you're also spending a lot of time in searching for how to get things done within the community, how the procedures were, which is not always clear, let's say not clear. so you have to, yeah, you have to dig in and then it takes a lot of time to find that out.Nahuai (20:49)Yep, the bureaucracy.Gaël Duez (21:00)maybe before we move to what happened in the dismantling quite abrupt as I mentioned in the introduction, I'd like and I'm very sorry for this to play a bit the devil advocates here and ask you a naive question. Why do we need WordPress guidelines when we start having W3C guidelines?Nora (21:24)Well, from a point of view as a designer, I am always in the side of the user. So for me, the WordPress guidelines were important to specifically explain people who is not into sustainability What they specifically have to do with their WordPresswebsite in the WordPress world. I suppose all the CMS works this way. There are many users, I think the most of the users making their own websites. So I thought it was important to explain these people are non-developer people, how to specifically set in their WordPress or use their WordPress.to make things more sustainable.from the WordPress perspective aloneNahuai (22:11)I couldn't agree more. I'm part of the group of the sustainable web of the W3C and it's an amazing work. What we are doing, mainly other colleagues, I have to say I have limited time to put into it, but I love it. And I try to do my best on that regard, but it's a very technical and long document. So even if sustainable web design did a great job filtering, because there is an open API, so you can go and grab thedifferent criteria and filter it. It's really nicely done, technically. Even if you go to the Sustainable Web Design, It's website in general, which is super cool, but I think that people that is working every day with WordPress, having something more linked with visuals and things that they say, okay, I know where I can do this or this other, I thinkNora (22:53)youNahuai (23:01)this really helps because it's more familiar. So I think everything we can do to make it easier for people that is interested on doing something, it's a move in a good direction.Gaël Duez (23:13)Fair point.I was expecting that kind of answersbut I wanted to understand how much overlapped was possible there because actually I was wondering if it was one of the reasons why the WordPress SustainB group was dismantled. And maybe now it's time for the three of you to explain what you feel and how you analyzed the, let's be honest, ofbrutal dismantling of the sustainability group as I described in the introduction. hypothesis number one, we've got W3C guidelines, no need for anything specific WordPress. I think you already answered this point, but hypothesis number two was like, is it some kind of a Trump-fueled backlash against everything which is sustainable and...you want to look nice to the new leader of the United States and as some other big tech behemoths just did recently kissing their new ring. So was it like a political move? Was it more maybe some sort of internal feud? What led to such abrupt end of your working group?Csaba (24:24)I have been thinking about it and to be honest, I don't think there was really that much of thinking behind the decision. It was a bit of a one-sided decision without any discussion questions asked. So it happened also very quickly after Thijs has resigned, let's say between quotes. Maybe what strikes me the most about this is that we were a group of individuals, contributors, not sponsored.most of us who were just contributing to WordPress and trying to make it better or at least environmentally, socially and so on better. yeah, it's kind of somewhere surprising, but also not regarding the current situation of WordPress.Nora (25:06)I don't have a clear picture of the whole thing because I wasn't into WordPress drama until it affected me and some community fellows I don't know Madd or his circumstances well enough to have a solid opinion about the why I think it is a personal thing it's not something biggerNahuai (25:20)ThankNora (25:27)I mean, I don't have an explanation, but it's pretty obvious to me that we can draw up parallel between his attitude and that of attitude of other big tech founders also at the moment. But I don't know.Nahuai (25:42)I have an hypothesis trying to be a bit more specific maybe for the people that is not inside the community and the WP drama and everything. So I think we cannot understand this decision without talking about the legal battle between automatic math because both are and WP engine. And this started in September of the last year andThe main reason to keep it simple was that Matt went into the stage in the keynote and publicly said that WP Engine, which is a WordPress hosting that is making a lot of money from WordPress, was not contributing enough. In that moment, they were contributing like 40 hours a week, something like that. And Automatic was contributing around 4,000. Okay. So he felt that it wasn't fair.if every company went this route, WordPress would probably die because there wouldn't be enough resources. So fair point till here. At least all I'm going to say is my vision. Okay. So don't take it as a representation of the sustainability team or anything. It's just now I took it. So after Engine started a legal battle against Matt.basically damaging the brand. Okay, let's say, let's put it that way. And there is more things that Matt say and everything, but I don't want to go down that road. And from this moment to the, probably the sustainability closing, team closing, it has been a different Matt.for us at least, maybe Matt was always like that. But what happened is that Matt asked to the community to take part on this. So he wanted to know if you were behind him or if you were not behind him and his...opinions and the things he was doing, you were against, pretty much, just to keep it simple. So the people that were vocal and going against Matt or his opinions, some of them were banned from Slack or from WordPress.org and things like that. again, my hypothesis is that Matt is...kind of in a battle mode because it's in a legal battle and he needs the community to be behind him. And I think the trigger point in our case, was Thais stepping down as a team rep of the sustainability team because he was not aligned with the new direction that Matt was giving to WordPress okay?And he made it public and he made it clear to Matt directly. And I think this was the trigger point. as I say, don't think there is much thinking about it. I think it was like, okay, these people were doing something. I don't recall knowing about it. Oh yes. I don't know. He said he didn't. And he was another power move. He made other power moves before. So this is my...vision. Of course, it's subjective and maybe it's wrong, but I felt like Matt took it as a little attack somehow. And he said, okay, this is not very dear to my heart either. And so we can close it. Well, he can close it. That's probably the more frightening part is that Matt can do a lot of thingswithout anybody saying nothing and that's the part that is yeah more difficult to swallow.Gaël Duez (29:11)you're actually reading my mind because I was about to say that sort of reassuring that very bad decisions are still taken not because of a grand schema to change the world in my humble opinion for the worst and having like this kind of a techno crazy agenda and all this, you know.movement that we see since the beginning of the year in the US within the tech sector, but just because of good old internal dilemma, feuds and the it should questionany source of open source or community of goodwill trying to achieve something about the governance model? Because how come that so many unilateral decisions were able to be made at WordPress? I mean, maybe the decision to close the sustainability was the right one. don't know. mean, obviously, I believe no, but I was not part of this community. So, you know, from an external perspective, I don't know. But what I do know for sure is thatNora (29:46)youGaël Duez (30:14)when as a manager you take such a big decisions, literally firing people, there is a way to do things, even if different cultures, you do things differently. Usually you don't do it the way I've just presented in the introduction. And you must get all people's opinions and you absolutely need to get all the insights, starting with the people who are obviously the most involved in the situation, who are the members of the teams.and in your case, the sustainability team. that really strikes me. what would you do differently?from a governance perspective to prevent this to happen if you were to work again in a very engaged and good-willing community as the WordPress one.Nora (30:56)Well, for me,as I have seen the community from external perspective is we trust too much in a voice, in a lead or in the vision one person had.But as I said before, the voice is not the community. Contributors are the community. I think sometimes we forget this. I think we have to do the effort to step up the inertia in the communities, not just WordPress, but any other.open source community and reflect on the continuity of the projectAnd I personally think we should go more into a democratic way of managing the thing, as many other people have said, like a governance with few people, not just one people, not because it is mad. I think a huge community or any other community should not be led byjust one person, but for a group of person choose or representative of the community itself. I don't know, for me it's kind of obvious, but when I get into this community, things were this way. So I was like, okay, if you are happy with this, I'm here just for working. So let's go for it.Gaël Duez (32:09)Hmm.So I got your point that even the most powerful voice is powerful because ofthe the community behind But there is something that I still don't understand is what is a governance structure? Actually, what is WordPress? what is the legal even structure of WordPress? Is it a foundation? Is it an association, an NGO? And how come that one person hasall the powerNahuai (32:39)It's tricky because there is a foundation, there is a WordPress foundation, okay? And Automatic gave the trademark. So this trademark, which is a huge trademark, was moved to the WordPress foundation, which is good, okay?Gaël Duez (32:43)Okay.Okay.Nahuai (32:56)And the WordPress foundation, it has a board of three people, Matt and another two members. But even if there is a foundation, the more important part of the community is probably the WordPress.org, which is the domain and everything make and everything and the plugins and everything is behind.Gaël Duez (33:10)Mm-hmm.Csaba (33:15)youNahuai (33:16)that domain and Matt is the owner of that. That's why he has quite a lot of power. Indeed, one of the moves he did was blocking the possibility of WP Engine to access to the repository of plugins, which is a kind of a big deal. Okay. And he can do it because he is the owner of the domain. So that part is not in the foundation. That's why it's tricky. And we discovered this lately because of...Gaël Duez (33:35)working.Okay.Nahuai (33:45)these things that didn't happen before. Because I have to say, I've been following Matt's path and I was pretty happy with the direction that WordPress was going. Mainly because of the community, but also because Matt was going in the same directionGaël Duez (34:00)that's very interesting what you're saying,because you can create a foundation, put some intellectual property within it, even the brands.But if you withhold some strategic assets, such as a domain name or some small pieces of intellectual property, actually, your foundation is still some sort of 100 % under your control. Am I right rephrasing a bit what you say that way?Nahuai (34:25)I think so. Sometimes I have doubts if we understand well enough the structure, because it wasn't clear enough before this storm came. Not the team closure, but the legal battle against WP. So I'm pretty sure that this is the way I described minutes ago. And I think if it is like that, it's not optimal, becauseGaël Duez (34:37)Hmm.Nahuai (34:50)As Nora said, I think these big things like the domain of WordPress.org and this kind of decision should be taken by more than one person. And till now there was no problem because Matt was being quite generous with the time he was putting with automaticians into the, in the community and with the trademark and everything. So till not that much time, it was pretty okay, everything.Gaël Duez (34:59)Hmm.Nahuai (35:16)And this battle kind of put into perspective how much power Matt has.Csaba (35:21)I very much agree upon how Nahuai has explained it. And also I think the bottom line we have learned, we learned a lot of things the last couple of months, but the bottom line is that we are very much dependent on WordPress.org for plugin updates, for team updates, everything that is very much hard-coded in WordPress. And that's something that we should, yeah.Gaël Duez (35:25)Hmm.Csaba (35:44)Think about a bit more if that's the way to go and probably not so.Nahuai (35:47)Yeah.I think Drupal has a pretty interesting structure of how they have the governance structure. And it would be super cool if we moved to something more closer to Drupal or other CMSs or other open source products for that sake. I'm not sure if right now it's going to happen. I still feel like...we are in a battle somehow, kind of in a battle. So I'm really hoping for the legal battle to finish and maybe the dust settle a bit and maybe some of the proposals can be look more calmly because there are some proposals right now. But I think Matt still sees them as a kind of an attack or power takeover or something like that again.My opinion, I'm not sure I don't usually talk with Matt about this, but hopefully if this goes, this inflammation, let's call it, goes down, maybe we can talk more calmly about how we want to move forward. That's my hope.Nora (36:42)Yeah.Gaël Duez (36:56)Nahuai you are a perfect guest because I was about asked what were the repercussions of this battle mode in the WordPress community, quoting you for other CMS providers. And if we could get lessons from other open source projects and you mentioned Drupal. So maybeCould you elaborate a bit on how Drupal is organizedNahuai (37:19)Yeah, probably I'm not the best person to talk about Drupal because I'm not inside it, butI really recall well is a post from the founder of Drupal, which was explaining how they try to reward the companies that are giving back to the Drupal project. Okay. And there is a system of credits on how if you give more back, you can...take some advantages, like being, I don't recall exactly, but maybe being highlighted as a plug-in maker or as a company or whatever. So that was one of the ideas that I found interesting because at the end, the main problem that we started this is that WP Engine was making a lot of money without giving anything back or very little back.But maybe if we put some kind of rewards on people that is giving back, we could solve that part.Gaël Duez (38:15)thanks, Nehru, to clarify this Drupal governance Did you get some feedback on how did people react to the closing of the sustainability teams and what do they want to do now to keep on moving on their sustainability journey?Nora (38:31)Well, something I'm happy this all brings is many people ask, or at least ask me, the question why technology thing, why WordPress, why any other project like that need a sustainability team or a sustainability group working on this. And many people were asking,in a bad way, like, we don't need this, but I think this question is important because many people, like Hannah Smith, for example, were answering this question, or even many people were just thinking about it, like, we don't need this, maybe we do. So I'm quite happy taking into account the situation because this situation with the sustainability team, I think, made people reflect on...If we need in technology groups for working towards sustainabilityGaël Duez (39:28)Thanks a lot. Nora, about the guidelines, are they still maintained somewhere? Did you migrate the working group on climate action tech or any other thought of a welcoming Slack community where you can keep on working or everything has been paused for the moment?Nora (39:46)Everything has been posted for a moment, but some people have asked us like, where are you going to work now on this? I don't have an answer for that because I didn't decide the thing, but we are still open to work on this. So if anybody listen to this says, okay, I'm into this and I want to collaborate, we can create something, but there is nothing at this moment.Gaël Duez (39:48)Okay.Hmm. So it's a hard stop. OK.Nahuai (40:17)same for me. Mymain idea is to keep contributing to the W3C group as far as I can. We are also in a very, very nice project from the GreenWeb Foundation that maybe later Nora can touch on it. And I will also continue to talk about sustainability in my podcast and in WordPress events. And as a plugin and theme maker, I have it.embedded in my workflow and I try to also explain it as one of the key features of the plugin or the theme. So I will continue to be interested and talking about it but as Anora said there is since we don't have an official channel and way of working right now we just paused and let's see where it goes but for now it's paused.Gaël Duez (41:06)And actually, before talking about this GreenWeb Foundation project, which I believe is very closely related to what you've tried to achieve at WordPress. That's true Nahuai I should have mentioned that we are colleagues because you've also got your own podcast. And can you maybe just pitch us for one minute? Because I reckon that they are very valuable resources for anyone working with WordPress tool to become more sustainable. Am I right?Nahuai (41:32)Yeah, yeah, I was lucky enough to be selected by the GreenWeb Foundation the fellowship they have. So as a project, I created a podcast. It's a limited series podcast. So it's just eight episodes and it's about WordPress and sustainability. And I was also lucky enough to have very nice and interesting people like Nora, Csaba Thjis, the team reps, but also Tim Frick, Tom Greenwood.people from the data sustainability and also for WordPress sphere. So I think if you're interested in the topic, could be a nice resource.Gaël Duez (42:05)Got it. And so because the GreenWide Foundation seems to be everywhere with the usual suspects that many of them were and surely will be again in the future, guests or speakers in Green IO or events. Maybe, Nora, to close on a more positive note this podcast, becauseNahuai (42:10)Thank you.Gaël Duez (42:26)just as a side note, I was expecting a bit more of a happy ending, that you've already some sort of bounce back and found an agreement that Matt realized that, okay, maybe I shouldn't close or that abruptly, or you've been welcomed by the performance team or you created already some something else. So it's really a bit of a runes at the moment and I feel...I'm kind of terribly sorry for all the hard work that you put you and hundreds of people, if I just count the numbers on the Slack channel. So yeah, it's a very disturbing thought that so much hard work that aim to go in the right direction with the pro and the con of every project, obviously, is, yeah, cancelled, I would say. But anyway, so to finish on a more optimistic note, Nora, you wanted also to talk about theproject that you are heavily involved within the GreenWeb Foundation. And it's all about carbon aware computing or am I misunderstanding something here?Nora (43:31)yeah, I'm super happy being part of this advisory group because we are working on making grid aware websites. We are trying to find a way to help developers to build websites without compromising user experience.So that's it. We are working on this and I hope this project achieves their objectives.Gaël Duez (43:56)So it's a grid aware computing and not a carbon aware computing. I should have known and sorry, but that's interesting to put it from a user rather than a purely technical perspective. I really like it. Okay. That was quite a long episode for you talking about things that are still obviously quite emotional. So I would like to thank you again a lot for joining and taking the time toNora (44:00)Yeah.Gaël Duez (44:21)pose and reflect on what happened and also share other projects and other potential resources for WordPress developer and designers. Is there any final positive piece of news that you'd like to share about sustainability at large or digital sustainability more specifically?Nahuai (44:43)I would say a general one. Even if the team is closed, I still feel like the people care about the sustainability. for the moment is enough for me to keep going and being somehow rewardedAnd they usually are willing to change something. So yeah, let's keep that as a positive note if we can.Gaël Duez (45:07)No, but the buzz is-Nora (45:07)Yeah, you canshoot down the team but you cannot make people disappear.Gaël Duez (45:12)Yeah.Csaba (45:13)hmm, hmm, hmm.Gaël Duez (45:17)Excellent. I guess that, there is no bad publicity as the marketers love to say. So I guess this buzz will at least help some of us to reach out new people or to highlight how strategic is sustainably within the digital sector. So thanks a lot for joining. I hope this episode will contribute a bit to this.noble task. once again, I'm sorry about what happened. And I feel very honored that you've chosen the Green Eye Podcast to share a bit more in details the story of the WordPress sustainability Team version one. And I hope that we will hear soon about version two.Nahuai (45:59)Thank you for having us, Gael.Csaba (46:00)Thank for having us, yes.Nora (45:59)Thank you.Gaël Duez (46:02)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please take 30 seconds to give us 5 stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. I know it's not easy to find a feature on these apps, but I trust you to succeed.Sharing the episode on social media or directly with anyone working with WordPress could also be a good idea, don't you think? Yes, I know you've heard this call to action a lot, but please do remember that being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board. Now, in your next episode, we will welcome the CTO of BackMarket, Dawn Becker,To tell us more about some radical choices she made in the green ops field. And yes, it involves her cloud provider.One last thing, GreenIo is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter. The last one has a great paper from Frédéric Bordage, who founded the greenit.fr community 20 years ago. And check also the conferences we organize across the globe. We opened the call for speakers for all five planned conferences this year in Singapore, New York, Munich, London and Paris.So if you want to share your experience in green software, sustainable design, green ops, responsible AI, you name it, please fill in the form. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to build with you fellow responsible technologists a greener digital world,❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

It’s a 252 pages report with the foreword of António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, talking about digitalization and sustainability. And, for once, it’s not another report from the UN stating “let’s digitize everything to boost sustainability”. Quite the contrary as it states a “unequal ecological exchange between developed and developing countries regarding digitization”. To discuss this “scientific report based on an ethical approach” as he described it, we welcome one of its contributors, Pablo José Gamez Cersosimo, based in the Netherlands. Another contributor, Paz Pena Ochoa, based in Chile, joined us to share her unique perspective on Latin America. Together they shared great insights about:    🗺️ Colonialism and Digitalization   🪨 Geopolitical Importance of Critical Minerals   💧 Water Footprint of Digitalization   ⚒️ Water Usage and Mining in Chile   🔎 The Digital Divide: A Growing Gap   🇺🇳 The Role of the UN in Digital Sustainability   And much more!❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here.  📣 The CFP for the 2025 Green IO Conferences is now live. Apply here to share your experience on Responsible AI, GreenOps, Sustainable Design, Green Software, ... Learn more about our guest and connect: Pablo José Gámez CersosimoPaz Peña Ochoa Green IO website Gaël Duez's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Pablo’s and Paz’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode:Latin American Institute of TerraformingPaz Pena’s book “Tecnologías para un planeta en llamas"UNCTAD's report “Shipping an Environmentally Sustainable and Inclusive Digitalization.” Digital Economy Report 2024. The real climate and transformative impact of ICT: A critique of estimates, trends, and regulationsClimateAction.TechBranch MagazineTranscript (auto-generated)Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (00:00)our digital world is literally liquids. It is the water that makes virtuality possible. That digital light is as blue as the fresh water that make it possible.Gaël Duez (00:19)Hello everyone, welcome to Green.io. I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. This episode is the first of 2025. And being released on January 30th, I can still wish you a happy new year, full of positive impacts. I hope you will find many occasions in 2025 for using technology responsibly, in order to maintain our world livable and our societies just inclusive and at peace. Full disclosure, I am sorry if I couldn't release this first episode of the year sooner, but January was a bit rough both on professional and personal level. Fortunately, everything is getting back on track, including your bi-monthly podcast. And something that is still on track is accessibility and transparent information remaining in the DNA of Green.io, so all the references mentioned in this episode as well as the full transcript are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website, greenio.tech.Gaël Duez (01:53)it's a 252 pages report with the foreword of Antonio Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, talking about digitalization and sustainability. And for once, it's not another report from the UN stating, let's digitize everything to boost sustainability. Quite the contrary, the report highlights the growing environmental impact of the digital economy and underscores the urgent need for environmentally sustainable and inclusive digitalization strategies. Quite a change. To discuss their insights and their implications, I am delighted to have with me two of its contributors. Pablo Jose Gámez-Certrozimo, based in the Netherlands, and Paz Pena Ochoa based in Chile. So yes, another 3 time zones Paz has dedicated more than 15 years to studying the intersection between technologies, social justice and gender. She has spent the last 5 years researching the socio-environmental impacts of digital technologies in Latin America, creating in 2021 the Latin American Institute of Terraforming. And in 2023, she published a summary of that research in the book Technologies for a Burning Planet, which is in Spanish, but I won't try to say it in Spanish, but you will have the link as usual in the show notes. And by the way, this book also made a great contribution to the branch magazine of Climate Action Tech. Pablo is an external researcher for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD, as well as a coach and a scientific journalist. His research includes the publication of Depreda... I shouldn't say it in Spanish as well, but I'm going to try. His research includes the publication of Depredadores Digitales 2021, which is a global investigation that sheds light on the complex digital carbon water and waste footprints of digitalizations.Welcome Paz, welcome Pablo. It's great to have you on the show today.Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (04:15)Thank you for having us in your program.Paz Peña (04:18)Yeah, thank you very much for having us.Gaël Duez (04:20)My pleasure, both of you.So Paz, is it the first UN-backed report ever to address the environmental impact of digitalization?Paz Peña (04:30)Yes, it is.Gaël Duez (04:32)So that's a kind of a game changer, isn't it?Paz Peña (04:34)Yes, I will say absolutely. As you said before, is a report that I will say one of the first reports by the UN saying that digitalization is not all good. Even more saying that the social environmental impacts of digitization are huge, but not only huge, are differential depending on where you are in the world.And this is very important because what it's saying is that the social environmental impacts of digitization, which are growing through the time, is being paid by the poorest of the world. The developing countries, the poorest countries. And again, the benefits of digitization.are being enjoyed almost only for the developed world, which brings us a very classical and difficult concept, which is the colonial relationships that are again being deployed in digitization, which is something really difficult to address in the UN, but it's so necessary in these times where sustainable or sustainability is being discussed as a justice issue. And that actually brings us to discuss how digitization can be a justice issue in terms of sustainability.Gaël Duez (06:09)And just to understand like the concept of colonialism or neo colonialism was brought to light in the UN report or is it more like an underlying evolution in the state of mind of UN representatives starting to incorporate this concept also in a main report as this one?Paz Peña (06:30)Yeah, they will not name colonialism as it is. I don't know, Pablo, if you saw that concept as it is, because it's a very political, difficult concept for a UN fora, However, yeah, exactly. However you can see powerful concepts as, you know, unjusties, you know, different effects between the world, etc. You can see actually what they are saying is about colonialism, but of course they are not named as it is, because probably it's a very difficult concept to address in the UN.Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (07:01)It is in between lines, I will say it. And to add what Paz already said, this report is the result of a process of a critical thinking process that took almost 18 months from 2023 to 2024. And it is also the result of the work of several scientific researchers from all over the world that were here for the first time, let's call it the first time at Geneva, to address the externalities regarding the digital ecosystem we are dealing with and not only that, that we are seeing intensifying in a way that we have never seen before. This is really important to address and this is the timely that explains the importance of this critical report. It is a scientific report based on an ethical approach.If you go deeply in this report, it says developing countries are suffering disproportionately from digitalization's negative environmental externalities of effects, as well as missing out on economic development opportunities to digital divides.It used the term unequal ecological exchange between developed and developing countries regarding digitalization. And this is also an complementary part of what Bas already said and your question. It is in between colonialism or neocolonialism.Gaël Duez (09:20)just before we deep dive into the importance of this report and maybe what's in this report, two short questions. The first one you mentioned that it was a scientific work. Was it mostly based on primary data or is it more an aggregation of other scientific studies that were used to build the end results?Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (09:44)It took and it used several primary and secondary resources. it is the most comprehensive integral report until now. It looks back from 1996 from the first ever report on digital sustainability until now. It addressed the problematic behind the methodologies that every single report used to say this and to say that. And there is no continuity at all because there is no universal understanding of methodology on how to deal with what we call the digital ecosystem. What is the digital ecosystem? That's your e-bike right now is part of the digital ecosystem or your Tesla car because they are already computers. They are already intelligent. They are already smart. We use also the primary data United Nations has with several agencies all around the world. And what you read, And this is really important to say also is a really comprehensive report. It is right in a common language that you and me can understand.Gaël Duez (11:22)So if I understand both of you right and if you indulge me to sum up a bit what you've said, this is the first of its kind tackling this issue. It has a broad ambition of tackling quite difficult topics, even if some of them are not named, but at least they are addressed.And it's also one of the most comprehensive based on several studies, quite a lot of researchers being involved. So I think it's a fair statement to say that pretty much everyone working in the digital economy should have a look at it. Am I right?Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (12:04)it is for everyone, for you and me, for the common ones, for all the ones involved in a digital transformation society. It is not only for politicians, it's not only for ICT. No, it is for the common people, for you and me.Gaël Duez (12:27)So I think we've teased enough about this report. Maybe Paz, if you allow me to ask you these questions. On the impact side, and we will talk a bit later on this very important social justice concept that you've raised, but on the impact size, what are the main findings? Maybe what are the one or two numbers that you believe everyone should be aware when it comes to the environmental impact of digitalization?Paz Peña (12:56)Sure, so first I will say that one of the greatest thing about this report is that Big Tech is not present there in terms of giving their reports as evidence. It's a very independent report, which is not so common even in the UN. I will say ANTAT is one of the few UN agencies that is still very independent in terms of funding, et cetera. And you can find here that this is a proof that big tech, these big companies are not present there. Actually, we were with Pablo doing the peer review in a couple of meetings with people of, UNCTAD's people, they were all independent researchers, which was very, very rich because the discussion was very, very honest. That is the first thing that is important to say because what you're gonna see in this report, it's scientific evidence, it's not big tech evidence, And the second thing that is really interesting is when you see actually the evidence of environmental impacts of sustainability is not a conversation only focused on CO2 emissions, which is a very important thing because of the use of energy and increase of the use of energy of digitization, but it's very...focus on the necessities of the global north, which is of course very important because the global north doesn't have energy matrix that is clean yet. But that is not actually a very big issue for the global south. For example, Latin America is the continent that has today the most clean energy matrix in the world.So the use of energy of digitization, it's important, of course, but it's not really the main issue here in the global south in terms of the environmental effects of digitization. So one of the things that for me, it's more interesting about the report is that actually has complete evidence there about carbon and digital technologies largely compete for the same critical minerals, especially in the global South. So...Minerals are a geopolitical factor that is actually activating policies around the global south from the global north to actually have access to these minerals. And then here you can actually start the discussion about how these geopolitical necessity of the global north of accessing to these critical minerals is actually affecting developing countries in terms of how this is feeding illegal mining for example or unsustainable practices in mining because that is where the money is today.Gaël Duez (16:07)I'd like to ask you one last question to get things a bit more concrete here, because you mentioned several times how the report is important, but most of the listeners, will not have read the report. So let me ask you this question to give you the opportunity to provide a bit of numbers or facts that are mind blowing enough for people to remember and to understand what you are highlighting. So, Paz, you've mentioned that actually digitalizations and the transition towards low carbon economy, they tend to compete for the same resources, especially minerals.Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (16:54)By 2050, we will need more than 150 billion tons of minerals annually. And that will include 50 new lithium mines, 60 new nickel mines, and the production of rare earth metals must be increased at last 12 folds. If you look...into e-waste this year or just published a couple of days ago by 2022 the world generated 62 billion kilograms of e-waste.It is extremely important to say the complexity we are dealing with when we try to define once again what is a digital device, what is a digital infrastructure, and what is not. Because if you look once again the example of an e-bike or a Tesla car.then we have to consider them as part of this digital ecosystem, but at the same time as part of the transitional electrification that we are dealing with. The way IoT devices are being created is a moving target that makes really difficult the definition right now of what is a digital device, what is not a digital device. But the main point here is how transitional minerals, that's the word we use in the report to refer to critical minerals, how the amounts of transitional minerals we are going to need. We are talking about open-bit mining. We are talking about the renaissance of the mining industry. We are talking about that we are completely dependent on all elements of the periodic and to obtain them you are not going to find them in Europe. You have to go to Global South to get them.Gaël Duez (19:19)And my question, Pablo, regarding this is really, what is the share of digital? mean, if I understand you right, what you're saying is pretty much everything is digital now. Am I right?Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (19:29)electrify and digital. We are living an electrification era and at the same time we are dealing with an internet intelligent era that is taking for its own almost everything, almost every device we use daily.Gaël Duez (19:52)Because in the research field, there are several, I would say, debates still going on on how you define what is the ICT sector and what is not the ICT sector. And what is the share of greenhouse gases emitted by the ICT sector? And usually it's believed between 2 and 4%, depending on the studies, et cetera, et cetera. And your point is...It's slightly irrelevant because the digital economy is fueling the entire economy I mean, you follow Malmöder, for instance, he has a very strong stance on what should be in the digital economy or counted as ICT and what should not like the TV debate, et cetera, et cetera. Your point isAnd that's maybe the point in this report as well. That doesn't really matter that strongly to draw a very clear boundary because electrification is everywhere, digitalization is everywhere, and that fueled the trend in this massive increase in mineral resources that you've just described a bit earlier. Am I correct to rephrase you that way?Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (21:06)you are completely correct.Gaël Duez (21:08)Okay, thanks. I got it.Pablo, you were mentioning having a holistic view on everything and I guess both of you, you stressed quite a lot the abiotic resources, mostly metals and minerals. But there are also other impacts that are touched upon in this report.We cannot list all of them, but can I briefly ask you to share maybe one or two figures or one or two facts that you believe are also very important when it comes to environmental impacts? And as far as I know, Pablo, you're quite keen on studying the water usage of the digital sector. Maybe you've got some things to tell us about.Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (21:55)Sure. we can understand this better if we say that the more virtual we become, the more fresh and potable water we need for that. And that means that our digital world is literally liquids. We surf the internet, navigating and diving into its waters. And I want to be here clear enough, Kyle. It is the water that makes virtuality possible. That digital light is as blue as the fresh water that make it possible.Now I'm talking here about data center industry. Here I'm talking now about the semiconductor industry. I'm talking here about the open pit mining industry.I'm talking here about the production of our gadgets,Gaël Duez (23:04)I there are quite a lot of examples about this, maybe Paz being based in Chile. I think this is one of the countries where the tension between the mining industries and the population regarding water usage has been one of the fiercest. So do you want to comment on what Pablo just said?Paz Peña (23:26)Yes, absolutely. in all Latin America, one of the biggest climate effects today is drought. And you can see that in different states. But in the case of Chile, Chile is suffering a historical drought for over 30 years where water is scarce, even for human consumption. And you can see that many of the territorial fights for different communities is actually the access of fresh water. And this is something that is present in mining activities, but also which are related to the digitization, for example, in terms of the lithium mining in the north of Chile, which is one of the biggest worldwide resources of lithium to digitization and green energies. And the fight there from indigenous communities is actually how this mining is affecting the access of fresh water for indigenous community there, which is basicallyhaving a very concrete impact in terms of the environment. Natural, different animals, for example, are being displaced from that place because of this scarcity of water. But also these indigenous communities are being displaced of their territories because of this, which is again something that we must discuss as a society why indigenous communities that haven't actually contributed to the ecological crisis and climate crisis that we are facing as a world, why they are paying the price of having green energies and digitization. This is one thing. But also, Gael...For example, here in Santiago, public policies are being deployed to be some sort of data center hub in Latin America. So there's a lot of data centers being built here in Santiago from like Big Tech, Alphabet, Microsoft, et cetera.And it's very interesting because many of the territorial fights that you can see here in Santiago are regarding the access of fresh water. It's about fighting the building of this huge infrastructure, digital infrastructure for example, in this year, actually at the beginning of this year, in February, I think, a court of law rescinded part of the authorization of the construction of this data center built by Google because there wasn't enough proof of the effects on the access of water for communities, how that will be affected by this huge infrastructure. And actually a couple of weeks ago, Alphabet desisted from insisting on the original design of this data center. And this, it means that they will modify and start all over again. But this is important, Gael, because it shows that people, organized people can actually fight this kind of infrastructure that is designed without seeing actually the environmental effects of its deployment, especially in terms of freshwater in this context of drought, but also in the context of the ecological and climate crisis.Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (27:15)Absolutely right.Gaël Duez (27:16)And Paz, what is the current trend in I've heard about some water quotas also for the mining industry. I've heard also that the mining industry was now building massive water pipeline to bring seawater into the mountains, has obviously a huge environmental and ecological and energy toll, but also to mitigate the water crisis. is it just one piece of news completely out of context that doesn't really describe properly what is at stake in the current train or actually is Chile getting more and more concerned about this water consumption issues and has started to regulate or to mitigate or to slow down the rising water consumption by both the mining industry and now because you've put that under the spotlight as well, the data center industry.Paz Peña (28:19)That's a very interesting question, Gael, because in Latin America, and especially, for example, in countries as Chile, we call ourselves a mineral country. We basically provide minerals to the world. So copper, for example, is a very important mineral for the Chilean economy. And now lithium, it is being really important because of this, because of green energies and because of digitization. So all our public policies are based on that extraction in terms of get money and pay everything that we need as an estate. So it's a very historical discussion are the environmental costs of mining in Chile because of this. But I will say in the last 15 years, the discussion around the access of fresh water is increasing, especially in the public opinion, because of the ecological and climate crisis that we're facing. we are now understanding that we are not going back to our earlier climate condition. Now we are living with drought for all our life. So this is a discussion that is increasing. It's a very difficult discussion to have because it depends on the economy, know, mineral economy which is why it's so important actually this kind of reports because it shows you actually who is paying the costs of green energies but also digitization in terms actually of access of fresh water.Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (30:14)I mean, without the natural resources of global south, it's no possibility to talk about digital transition or green energies. Another really interesting example, not only talking about the mineral countries in Latin America or the ones that are dealing with data centers, it is now the semiconductor industry that is taking over the region. And do not forget that this industry consumes over 264 billions gallons of water per year. And that is more than Hong Kong. And this industry needs a lot of ultra-pure water and you can find it in places as Costa Rica, for example, chosen from the Biden administration to hold Intel expansion in the region. And this is, again, one of the new debates that are taking over in the region.is this the economical progress we want to go in and with and that will cost this precious element we need to survive. put it in another way, data needs at this moment more water daily than you and me to exist.Gaël Duez (31:47)So we've covered quite a lot of the environmental impacts. We could also talk about the energy consumption. We could also talk about a bit more in details, greenhouse gasses. We could also talk about the share of electricity consumption used by the digital economy. But actually both of you at the very beginning of the interview, brought under the spotlight some very key and differentiator aspects with this report around social justice and some geopolitical significance of this report. And maybe I'd like to give you the floor now to talk a bit more about what I've understood to be some sort of a digital revolution paradox which is that those contributing the most in terms of resources, including human resources, I mean workers, are not the one benefiting more of it, of this digital revolution. I know that this is one of your specialties. Could you tell us a bit more? how you analyze this discrepancy.Paz Peña (32:52)Yeah, actually in the report you can see that UNCTAD is addressing that today digitalization is under a very concentrated market. That means that few companies actually are available to actually developed these very digital economies of the 21st century. And many of those companies are based in the US, others are in China, some of them very few are in Europe. And many of them are what we known as big tech companies. They have the power to have the infrastructure, the worldwide infrastructure to actually be able to address this need of digital economy in the world. So when we talk about digitization, for me it's really interesting to say, but who is behind that digitization? There are not many companies behind that. There are not many countries behind that.you can count the companies that are available to actually address this task. And there are a few of them, probably 20, 25 in the world. So this is the first thing that I think we need to discuss. Who is actually enjoying the benefit, the economic benefits? Yes, they are, you know, developing countries, industrialized countries of digitization, But not all the people actually. The ones that are enjoying the benefits of digitization the most is, these companies, no? Why there's this need to make everything digital is because there's a big push in terms of lobby to do that because these companies know that is where the money come from. So this is the first thing I believe is important to understand and this report will help us to understand that. The UNCTAD is addressing that there's a concentration of market in digital economy and this is a huge problem. This is the first thing. And the second thing I will say is that, as you said, Gaël the biggest question that we need to address here is also who is bearing the costs of digitization.And you can see this worldwide where there's a gap between developing countries with industrialized countries. And there's a gap there that we have been discussing in this podcast. But also we need to address that even in developed countries, there is also communities that are bearing the cost of digitization. communities that are actually being cut off the access of fresh water in, for example, Europe, etc. And also this is a question of justice, but it's not only a question of justice between developed and developing world, but also in our communities in all the world, which is something that is very important to understand.Gaël Duez (36:20)when you say, and let me be the devil advocates here. When you say, Big Tech is benefiting the most from digitalization. Does it overlook all the benefits that quite a lot of people get also from digitalization via new jobs, better services, more productivity, you name it. mean, there are countless of reports and you've mentioned at the beginning that quite a lot of them are also sponsored by the digital industry, a lot of them are biased. But I would say for the average North American or European or Japanese or Chinese citizen, believing that digitalization doesn't bring mostly valuable things would be quite hard to sell. question is, sure, Big Tech is reaping quite a lot of the benefit, at least in the global north, does overall the population also benefit from this digital revolution?Paz Peña (37:28)Yes, but that is something that you can actually discuss. how digitization is actually benefiting our economies because you can say also that you are lowering the work standards that we had before digitization, for example. You can see, and there's many reports on how digitization is influencing this trend of uberization of economy, there's no doubt that developed countries are having more benefits because they have a more digital economy.But you have to understand that today in the current state of capitalism, for many theorists, digitization is actually lowering the standards of work, for example, without even discussing all the other implications of digitization in terms oftechno-capitalism today in terms of, for example, mental health through being connected all day to social media, cetera. So this is not so clear. It's not so clear that all is benefits. But also, I think it's important to say that in developing countries, many developing countries, even I'm from Chile, so Latin America is a region that I know. In many countries in Latin America, the digital economy is not well developed yet. So when we are going through this global discourse of saying, so to be sustainable enough, we need digitization, digitization of everything. That means concretely today that the gap between these countries that are not having a digital economy well developed, that means that those countries will increase the with industrialized countries, with Europe, with Japan, et cetera. So that gap, that inequality gap is something that is not being discussed very seriously in the world. And I think, again, this and that report help us to understand that kind of new gap that we are creating with this discourse of saying, OK, we need to digitalize everything. Yes, that's maybe something good for the developed countries, but you have to be aware that developing countries are still behind that. And this could actually widening that gap, which is very, very serious matter.Gaël Duez (40:09)how would you define social injustice actually when it comes to the digital economy and could you provide one or two examples of this imbalance that you've described previously?Paz Peña (40:22)Sure, so I think we can define that... ...unjustice in the context of digitization is that... ...most of the added value created in the digital economy is captured by developed and digital advanced developing countries. many of the social environmental costs of digitization are paid by developing countries. And this is especially important, for example, in terms of mineral extraction, where the global south is basically the most affected by the extraction of minerals that are needed by the digital economy.And minerals are being extracted from the Global South, that means a lot of pollution, a lot of illegal mining, which means human rights violations of people, displacement of indigenous communities, scarcity of fresh water, et cetera. Many people, for example, say that there's no way that green mining is possible. All mining have a lot of social environmental costs. And that is something that is as important to examine. So the latest UNTAD report actually what does is to examine those social environmental impacts of digitization in developing countries, which means to not only review evidence, scientific evidence, but also have a call, an international call for countries not only developing countries, but also industrialized countries to understand the need of sustainable digitizationBut also, Gael, I just want to add something that I believe is really important to understand. It's that what we're seeing today is a geopolitical discussion where digital economy is really important. today digitalization or the digital economy is being discussed together with the transformation of our energy matrix to a more greener one. These two things, green energies and digitizations, is being discussed as one thing, as something that is needed for a more sustainable world. who is the boss in digital economy and who is available and have the capacity to have most important share of green energies in the world. So this is where the discussion is happening today.Gaël Duez (43:17)And what about the UN with this geopolitical impact? I this is supposed to be the place where nations are talking to each other. And, know, when I've read the report, I've seen all the recommendations about what should be done. And it sounded a bit like a wishful thinking list. And I was discussing it with a Green IO listener, Benjamin Davy, and he was really questioning whether the UN should or even is able to actually shift a bit from a reporting stance. This is how things are going to a more pedagogical stance and even maybe a bit of name and shame if possible, So my question is, what can actually the United Nations do about it and what actually should we do about it also?Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (44:16)United Nations UNCTAD in this case has adopted digital sustainability as a priority under the understanding the principle of common but differentiated responsibility as high relevant.It is time also to extend the calls for both actions to the entire life cycle of digitalization and to systematically track its social environmental footprint. Be aware of the socio-environmental footprint of the mechanics behind the digital economy and be aware that the problem or part of the problem can be solved with the circular design. But be aware that if we do not follow that way, we are going to deal with really complex problems in the near future. I think this is the main thing, or one of the main things of this UNTACD report.Gaël Duez (45:31)Paz what do you think about the potential for collaboration at UN level and what the UN should do about it?Paz Peña (45:39)The UN is going through a huge political crisis because of the war between Israel and Palestine and Lebanon. And also because the lack of concrete action in terms of the climate and ecological crisis we are facing through. But there's also a lot of critics regarding the UN forum and its role in the technological, digital internet governance, because mainly there's a lot of big tech influence in there, et cetera. So I think we need to be realistic and understand the political limits of the UN. There's a lot of fight inside. There's a lot of interest there. I mean, I'm very critical about that, but that doesn't mean that you can actually take these kind of reports and do your own political work as a community, as a territory, as a researcher, et cetera. I do like a lot of many of the conclusion of this report and that reports. really believe that circular as Pablo said, can be something important in terms of the designing of the digital economy. But I do also believe that circular economy is just a mitigation policy. It's not addressing the biggest problem of digital economy, which is basically this logic, this capitalist logic of extraction. This idea, as Pablo said, the idea that we have infinite resources for the economy, which is a completely crazy idea in terms of our reality, in terms of natural resources. And I don't think we can find in any report, including the UNCTAD report, a recommendation that is addressing the problem of capitalism today in digitization, which for me is the biggest problem. But that doesn't mean that these kind of reports that are designed with independent scientific science can help actually communities to understand their reality and actually start to have a more political reaction to it. So I will say, of course, I don't think the UN can do something more relevant in this issue, but I do believe that this kind of report can actually be very useful for communities around the world.Gaël Duez (48:32)So more awareness than actual actions because of the ongoing political crisis, according to you, Paz. I? Okay, got it. And my last question for both of you would be,Paz Peña (48:40)I will say, yeah, yeah, yeah.Gaël Duez (48:46)As someone working in this digital economy and many listeners of this show are actually workers of the digital economy.What can we do? How should we react to such a report? And what would be your two cents on tackling the different large issues that are highlighted in this report?Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (49:02)We need to go back to our critical thinking.And with the critical thinking, break the magical digital thinking we are dealing with.Understand that cyberspace has a growing footprint, multi-dimensional, that every time we use, we deal with our digital environment has a consequence.Paz Peña (49:38)I believe that digital workers are essential for change in digitization and in digital economies, are essential. And I actually have two concrete suggestions for workers in the digital industry. First, one of the most important is think about tech differently. try to experiment with new designs of tech that can be actually more sustainable, that cannot necessarily think in growth and growth and growth and maybe think in technology that can be used in territories with the participation of communities, et cetera. Let's try to think out of the box and believe in other tech is possible.the second thing, if you're working in a big tech company and in the industry, it's so, so important for workers to fight for more transparency in terms of the social environmental impacts of that company in different territories. fight for transparency. You are key in this. Today what we are dealing with is that companies tend to be very obscure in how they report their environmental impacts. If we can fight for more transparency, it's something that is so key not only for scientific but also for territories, for people in their territories that can actually start a dialogue with companies. And I think workers are key for that. And for me, this is the second very concrete suggestion. Fight for transparency.Gaël Duez (51:34)fight for transparency. Quite a tagline for this episode.What would be a positive piece of news that both of you would like to share regarding the ongoing trend in the digital economy?Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (51:47)I see there is more attention to the importance of the circular design in our digital world. I also see more efforts, for example, at the… European Union level to address critical matters regarding not only the circular design, but also the power of Big Tech Corporates regarding artificial intelligence.And what I'm also is a more critical thinking approach on the digital ecosystem we have, the nature of it, and the chances we have to correct.Paz Peña (52:35)I completely agree with Pablo. Five years ago, even three years ago, you didn't see many news in the outlets around the social environmental impacts, for example, of AI, of the digital economy. Today that is completely changed, I think.There's also a lot of critical thinking or more critical thinking around digitization, but also that means there's a lot of territorial movements saying, know, these digital technologies have a very concrete material impact in our realities. That means that there are people, not necessarilypeople that is related to tech, but people in their communities saying, you know, let's discuss about this. And this is something that you can see in the media outlets. And I think that is very, very positive because that means that people is alive actually, know, trying to change and to have a better world, a sustainable world, even in digital technologies.Gaël Duez (53:49)thanks a lot, both of you for highlighting the rise in awareness, at least in our industry. And let's hope that it will have some impact at some point, but awareness is always the first step. And this is a very reason of this podcast as well.And yeah, it was really nice to have you both of you on the show, not talking the regular green software or responsible AI topics, but zooming out a bit and discussing massive geopolitical and social issues. So thanks a lot, both of you for this.Paz Peña (54:12)Thank you, Gael, for the invitation.Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (54:20)thank you very much for make this space possible. And this is also really positive to mention the attention that you are giving also to this issue. Thank you very much.Paz Peña (54:30)Yeah.Thank you and so nice to see you, Pablo.Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (54:39)That's it. Bye!Gaël Duez (54:44)Thank you for listening to this Green.io episode. Sharing it on social media or directly with, well, pretty much everyone working in the digital sector or using digital services seems a good idea regarding what is at stake here. You know the drill, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board. In our next episode,We were supposed to welcome the CTO of Backmarket, Dawn Baker, to tell us more about some radical choices she made in the GreenOps field. However, the brutal dismantling of the sustainability team at WordPress requires some coverage. And I will be honored to welcome in the next episode three of the initiators of this grassroots movement. Nahuai Badiola, Nora Ferreiros and Csaba VarszegiThere will provide us some context and clarification about what happened and more importantly what to do next when you are a responsible technologist using WordPress as your main CMS. course, the episode with Dawn Baker will be released just after. Don't worry. One last thing, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. We opened the call for speakers for our five planned conferences this year. It will be in Singapore, New York, Munich, London and Paris. So if you want to share your experience in green software, sustainable design, green art, responsible AI, you name it, please fill in the form.I'm looking forward to meeting you there to build with you, fellow responsible technologists, a greener digital world.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

Tristan Nitot, co-founder of Mozilla Europe and a champion for open source and privacy, dives into the challenges of digital sustainability. He argues that Eroom's Law, rather than Moore's Law, should guide future technology development. Nitot discusses the staggering waste of resources tied to old devices and calls for software engineers to adopt frugal practices. He critiques AI's role in optimization, warns about programming inefficiencies, and emphasizes the need for organizational accountability in promoting sustainability in tech.

Annie Freeman, a software engineer at Xero, spearheaded a grassroots initiative to monitor carbon emissions, earning recognition as a finalist in the New Zealand Sustainable Business Network Awards. She shares how two motivated engineers can drive sustainability in a large company, emphasizing the importance of teamwork and management support. Annie discusses integrating eco-friendly practices into workflows, the creation of a carbon footprint calculator, and leveraging data management to enhance sustainability efforts, all while fostering a culture of awareness and collaboration.

3 billion gamers worldwide, billions of devices, terabytes of data streamed, the gaming industry comes with pretty big numbers starting with its $455 billion sales in 2023. Is its environmental footprint as big? (Not) fun fact, not a single executive in this sector could answer the question. A new non-profit initiative, the Sustainable Gaming Alliance, is trying to get these numbers right and to equip the industry with the right framework. Its Managing Director, Maria Wagner, and its Research and Standard lead, Dr Benjamin Abraham joined this Green IO episode where great insights were shared on:👿 The periodic table of torture for gaming device,🖼️ The Gaming industry dependency on graphics to boost its sales🕹️ Why “this game is beautiful” should be replaced as a praise by “this game is so enjoyable”📋 Why GHG protocol is not adapted to the gaming industry🌋 How to shake up a multi-billions industry in 10 weeks ?🔄 Why the project mode in the game industry - and elsewhere? - doesn’t help a GreenOps culture to flourish😴 Energy consumption at idle state❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in Paris on December 3rd, 4th and 5th (use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket) Learn more about our guest and connect: Ben's LinkedInMaria’s LinkedInGreen IO website Gael Duez's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Ben and Maria's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:The Sustainable Gaming Alliance Website The SGA youtube channel (with recorded workshops and interviews) The SGA discord channel SGA - How it all started: 10 weeks to save the games industry Greening the Game Industry, Ben’s newsletterBenjamin’s book “Digital Game after Climate Change”Wattwise the game jam dedicated on the energy consumption of video gamesGodot game engineUnreal game engineDigital Collage workshopNature article on climate protests Giovanni’s Celeste gameThomas Beaufils’ newsletter “Tales from the Tech”Signatories against gaming in MetaverseTranscript (automatically generated)Ben (00:00)the idea that the gaming industry globally has a footprint probably the size of a country like Sweden.was just on no one's kind of radar. My best guess is that it's somewhere in the tens of millions of tons. The disclosures that I've added up over the last couple of years from the biggest game companies in the world point to a figure somewhere around about 20 to 50 million tons per annum.Gaël Duez (00:24)Hello everyone, welcome to Green.io. I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month, on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green.io,All the references mentioned in this episode as well as the full transcript will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on the website greenayo.tech.I'm all in mushrooms at the moment. This is how a few months ago Giovanni Celeste started to describe his new game. He kept on. They're incredible and you can tell great stories with them. Of course, to be more mainstream, the first part of my new game is about bees. But I'll do scenes with mushrooms. Giovanni is a pillar of the small but vibrant gaming sector in Réunion Island where I live.He crafts games focusing on the ecological transition. He works either with a small team or by himself. He's what is called an indie developer. Before our discussions, I hadn't realized how diverse and complex the gaming industry was. For me, it was mostly massive studios delivering entertainment to more than three billions of gamers worldwide.or discussions, reactivated a question I had in the back of my mind for some time. How is the gaming industry doing with its environmental footprint? With massive data transfers, billions of devices sold, and all of the computing power used to develop and run the games, it cannot be negligible. Thomas Bouffis, from the Tales from the Tech newsletter, pointed out to me several signs showing a modest interest in the sector.Starting with very few C-level offices exclusively in charge of sustainability in the main studios. Sure, here and there some initiatives are emerging such as a petition against developing games in the metaverse, the ongoing work of the French agency ADEME on a referential for sustainable gaming, or what was the active game jam on the energy consumption of video games.Still, most of the buzz is about the gaming industry helping to raise awareness on climate change and ecological transition, almost nothing about its ownThis is where Giovanni told me about the Sustainable Gaming Alliance. And voila, I eventually found experts to discuss the gaming industry environmental footprint.Maria Wagner and Dr Benjamin Abram respectively the SGA Managing Director and SGA Research and Standard Lead kindly agreed to answer my questions about the footprint and more importantly what a tech worker in the game industry sector should do about it. Ben has written an entire book on the topic digital games after climate change based on his PhD work. Maria's personal story could be the scenario for a video game.Before becoming a seasoned actor in the gaming industry, she worked in diplomacy, intercultural conflict management, as a political observer in Syria, or ran a refugee camp. Wow,the perfect fit to run a global multi-stackholders initiative to green a 455 billion dollar market.Gaël Duez (04:00)So welcome Ben, welcome Maria. It's great to have you on the show today.Ben (04:06)Thanks, Gael. It's great to be here.Maria Wagner (04:06)Thanks for having us.Gaël Duez (04:09)You're welcome. Just to understand a bit the context before deep diving into the environmental footprint of the gaming industry and the many, many, different topics that I'd like to cover with you. What makeGaël Duez (04:24)The gaming industry is so specific within the tech industry. And how come that we usually don't incorporate in the big green software, green IT, sustainable IT, you name it, momentum, which is happening around the world, what is related to the gaming industry itself. And as I said in my introduction, the gaming industry is pretty big, both in terms of a number of gamers, employees and workers.So I guess in terms of footprint as well. Maria, you're a very knowledgeable person of this industry. Could you maybe try to give us an answer?Maria Wagner (05:00)Yeah, I think the games industry is very special when it comes to the connection to the people and of course also the reach, right? As you have said, we are reaching basically half of the globe and this is something which a lot of people forget that we are the medium ofthe times. So compared to movies and films or the TV, there is no other medium which reaches so many people and I think this makes us really special.Gaël Duez (05:33)It's a question of reach according to you more than the technical setup behind it.Maria Wagner (05:38)The technical setup behind it, of course, as well, I would say it's way more complicated because it connects so many different parts when it comes to games. There are so many parts which need to come together to make a game happen and this is maybe something also Ben can cover perfectly because he looks into the value chain.Ben (05:55)The thing that separates the game industry from just general software and tech to my mind is that it is a software industry, but it's also an art form. It's an art industry. it's both artistic practitioners who work with digital tools. So there's like 3D artists, there's also coders, there's also community managers. There's a really strong emphasis on engagement with the end users.Games companies are very aware of what their users are interested in and care about. And so it is just a software company. Games are just a software development exercise, but they are also an artistic exercise as well. There's a creative dimension to it.Gaël Duez (06:47)Which makes them pretty specific, I would say, because I've never heard about a piece of SAP reporting being branded as arty.What about its environmental footprint? We're talking about billions of users. We're talking about hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. So I guess it's pretty big. I couldn't really see any global report onthe environment and footprint of the gaming industry. So maybe that's an issue that we should discuss a bit later in the episode. But what are the numbers or the order of magnitude that you could share with us to grasp how much is the gaming industry impacting the planet?Ben (07:29)So in terms of orders of magnitude, I think that's the right question to ask because we really only have a rough sense. It is in the tens of millions, almost certainly. Is it less than a hundred million? Possibly. When I started the research work that became the book that I wrote, Digital Games After Climate Change, there washardly any kind of research out there. I couldn't find anyone who was even really thinking about what the impact globally of the games industry was in terms of emissions at any rate. There was a bit of awareness of things like e-waste, resource consumption, that, know, vaguely there's this thing called the cloud that's probably not great for the environment. But the idea that the gaming industry globally has a footprint probably the size of a country like Sweden.was, was just on no one's kind of radar. and so My best guess is that it's somewhere in the tens of millions of tons. The disclosures that I've added up over the last couple of years from the biggest game companies in the world point to a figure somewhere around about 20 to 50 million tons per annum. And that's just, just playing games. That's players that's.infrastructure, making the games themselves, offices, it's everything. the complexity of it really does sprawl.Gaël Duez (08:54)And Ben, you're mentioning to greenhouse gas emissions when you mentioned talking about millions. That was the main focus of your study in terms of environmental impact. Am I right here?Ben (09:05)It was, yeah. So I, I tried to break down the production process into different phases and looked at what is involved in each phase. So developing games, it's a lot of power in offices, it's IT purchases, new equipment. distributing games involves data centers, the digital distribution networks of steam, the Apple store, the Google play store, you know, all these devices that are getting games downloaded to them.And then the end users themselves and the devices that they play games on, whether that's a games console or a PC or a smartphone. And each one of them has vastly different levers of decarbonization potential and vastly different levels of transparency even in terms of what we know about each phase.Gaël Duez (09:56)And did you manage to calculate also the embedded carbon or was it only carbon emitted by the energy consumption or alsothe carbon emitted during the manufacturing and extraction phase, so through the entire life cycle of all the devices.Ben (10:14)So I did also look at embodied carbon and I also actually looked at a little bit of the other non-climate environmental impacts, so things from like mining rare earth materials and things like that. So actually in my book, there's a really interesting table, like I call it the periodic table of torture, where I go through a list of elements that were detected via this advanced ICPMS method.of analyzing what are the atomic elements inside a PS4 chip. And I go, okay, well, what are they probably doing in there? Where do they come from? What are they used for? Are they part of the transistors? Are they part of some other part of the lithography process? Yeah. And so when it comes to games consoles, at least, companies like Microsoft and Sony have gotten a bit better over the years at disclosing what the embodied carbon is in those.consoles. So we know a little bit about them, but PCs, because there's so many device manufacturers, there's so many different hardware components. Yeah, again, that's just this big question mark unknown area.Gaël Duez (11:18)That's interesting because you mentioned embedded carbon, so everything related to greenhouse gas emissions, but you also touched upon the material footprint, which is how much we need to extract to get one piece of console or chip to be manufactured.When I facilitate digital collage workshop, that's a figure we use a lot, which is basically for two, 300 grams smartphones, we need to extract around 70 kilos of resources. this ecological backpack is pretty big. Do you know if this is this same order of magnitude for a console orCan it be a bit smaller?Ben (12:00)It's a really hard question to answer. My suspicions are that they're about the same.I don't have any hard numbers exactly, so my study was done on the smell of an oily rag. I had no money to do it and my research lab couldn't actually tell me the exact quantities that are in them. it's a good guess that most games consoles are probably equivalent to like a smartphone.Okay, well, that's pretty big. It's a ratio in terms of hundreds times more than the actual weight of the device. pretty good. Maria, are there other environmental impacts that the gaming industry is starting to get aware of?Maria Wagner (12:37)At the moment we are in the phase of raising awareness in general when it comes to the footprint of the value chain and really producing games because I think there is a big focus when it comes to the reach and what people can communicate through their games. when it comes togetting their own house in order and looking at the value chain and decarbonizing the value chain itself. There we still have a long way to go.Gaël Duez (13:09)I think I'm going to hire you to explain to everyone why this podcast is about cleaning our hand house rather than doing green tech or tech saving the world, etc. That's exactly the approach I've got. Okay, so before deep diving into the industry and more specifically a tech worker in the gaming industry can do, I've got one questionSo as a gamer in my personal life, are there some things that I should specifically focus on to reduce my environmental footprint? Maybe Maria, do you have some idea?Maria Wagner (13:46)you can look at your electricity grid. So where do you get your electricity from is a huge factor. And of course, you also have to ask yourself if you always have to have the newest hardware, which is out there, or if it's possible to play your favorite game, maybe on like an older device.Yeah, so I think this is something what players can do for sure. And of course, being more vocal about it. Ask your favorite game studios about their footprint and responsibility and the same goes, of course, also for the hardware.Gaël Duez (14:24)Regarding the devices, what is the churn rate? Smartphones used to be crazy. the average use span of a smartphone used to be a year and a half. So people were literally dropping perfectly functionable devices to get the newest one. It gets a bit better since a few years. I think it's a bit above two years, which is completely insane.And you think about all the energy and materials and resources put into this incredibly sophisticated device. anyway, I've heard that the gaming industry, the console, people tend to use them a bit longer. So how much the device is something that we as gamers should also focus on? Or how much is it more about energy consumption, as you mentioned a bit before?Ben (14:48)It's still so short, yeah.Maria Wagner (15:16)I mean, this is a question or this is a topic we actually discussed, I think, just like last week. So, of course, it takes up a lot of resources to produce new hardware. So I think we should in general question our culture of...having software which always needs new devices, know, so basically adapting the software in a way that we can still use the old devices and it still would run perfectly. So it's hard to say because of course if we would use hardware way longer then it would be more an energy question and optimizingthe software to use less energy. But as long as we keep pushing the boundaries and need always new hardware, this is still a big question.Ben (16:15)Maybe I'll just add a little bit extra context or a little bit extra color there then. The games industry has been basically since the 1980s, it's relied on selling games or marketing games via a kind of approach thatthat sells based on graphics, right? Like this, it's slowed down a little bit in the last five to 10 years, but for the longest time it was like, you know, it went from eight bit graphics to 16 bit to 32, and then you get polygon counts, resolutions, frame rates. And so that's been kind of embedded in the games industry for a really, really long time now. The expectation is we're going to sell games by saying, ooh, this year's model is better.There's more polygons or it's, you know, it goes up to 200 frames per second or it's more responsive or it's got this new engine or that new feature. And that drives the hardware upgrade cycle. So even though console generations, so if we're just talking about console gaming last for somewhere between six, seven, maybe eight years at the very most in terms of like, you know, a new one comes along and it's upgraded and better.Usually what ends up happening is we get these mid cycle refreshes where you know get the ps4 pro or the ps5 pro or you know these upgraded ones Yeah, so basically the games industry has been locked into the hardware upgrade cycle for a really really long time And we're really really reaching the limit of that in in the last year or so The games industry has been through a real shake-up. It's been through a real crisisIt's because production costs of making games has been so high because of this churn of graphics and visual fidelity that just means you need to throw more and more artists at the problem, more and more 3D modelers, more and more texture and all of this sort of stuff. And that's to sell more consoles, to sell more games. And that's part of this unsustainable trajectory that we really need to rein in.Gaël Duez (18:21)And you know, Ben, it super interesting because I remember that when I used to magazine, yes, paper magazine on games, the best way to praise a game was, is beautiful. It is an interesting choice of word. Like, it is a beautiful game. And it was,As you say, a lot based on graphic and not necessarily how enjoyable it was to play with this game. we could have expected a journalist wanting to praise a game saying, it's incredibly gameable or enjoyable to play with, or it got many twists or you get completely hooked by the story.That's true that most of the time it's all about how beautiful, how well crafted, how pixel perfect the game is. I think it has started to change a bit in the industry. it was really something that struck my mind when you mentioned it, this vicious cycle of always more hardware. to wrap up what you both said for a gamer, it's really about...questioning the need for the latest shiny stuff and considering keeping the hardware longer and make sure that the electricity grid is as decarbonized as possible, especially, I guess, if the person plays a lot via streaming solutions. Am I right to summarize it that way?Maria Wagner (19:47)I maybe would also just add there are so many beautiful games out there which don't have like the craziest newest like graphic and the craziest needs when it comes to hardware and this is something which we need to cherish and I think it's just like as you said before a marketing question thatespecially like the big corporations is on the shiniest versions and like the games which need a lot of resources but there are also games out there which are completely the opposite and are beautiful as well.Ben (20:25)Just to add on to that as well, I think one of the things that I want to emphasize too is that this is what we know at the moment, right? So the ability for consumers to actually affect their end emissions when they're playing games is actually quite limited, right? A lot of the power is in the choices that have already been made by people upstream, by big corporations, by big companies.will be things that consumers can do. And that's sort of what I think needs to kind of happen. And what we're hoping to do with the SGA actually is to get the whole of the industry, consumers, producers, fans, know, even people who hate the games industry, all to be on the same page about, where do the biggest interventions need to happen? Where do we get the most bang for our buck?Gaël Duez (21:19)Ben, what a wonderful transition. Let's talk about the gaming industry itself.So maybe it's time to talk a bit of, first of all, as a worker in the IT industry, sorry, in the gaming industry.How much am I exposed to the fact that I'm also part of the problem and I emit greenhouse gases and I consume a lot of non-renewable resources, et cetera, et cetera? What is the level of awareness in the gaming industry at the moment?Maria Wagner (21:49)Yeah, I mean, this is exactly the question which, like one of the other co-founders, Jiri Kupjainen and I was asking ourselves when we did our 10 weeks to save the games industry tour, where we really wanted to interview the leaders of the industry and just find out what is their knowledge level on this topic. so...Maria Wagner (22:14)like we interviewed around like 40 industry leaders within 25 cities and found out that they don't know anything about it. most of the people,Maria Wagner (22:30)A lot of people think that because games are digital that they are automatically green or that they say, okay, compared to other industries, we don't have such a huge footprint. So we don't need to focus on that, which is of course crazy because we don't have any data.Gaël Duez (22:51)The level of awareness seems to be very, very low, even compared to other subparts of the IT industry. mean, usually, the, it's in the cloud, so it doesn't pollute anymore.It's something a bit of the past now in the IT industry. That was something that you could hear maybe five years ago, but not that much today.Gaël Duez (23:10)So you mentioned the Sustainable Gaming Alliance and I guess you created the SGA as a reaction when you realized with Yuri and other people that the level of awareness was super low. Could you tell us a bit more about this organization? Why you created it and how is it helping to contribute today to a greener, if I may use the word, gaming industry?Maria Wagner (23:33)Yeah, basically, before founding the Sustainable Games Alliance, I for my part was leading the Games Forest Club, another NGO, was helping games companies to donate to forest protection. And there I realized very fast that a lot of companies usethe forest protection or planting trees as a way to, you know, think of themselves that they're done their part and being green. But the problem is, of course, that they never looked at themselves and at the value chain. So they did not understand that they need to decarbonize and need to, yeah, really basically change the way they're doing business.to be sustainable. So in the conversations which we were having together with Jiri, found out that we need numbers. We basically need numbers to be able to address this topic. there are no comparable numbers at the moment. At the moment, every company can just like...publish and say whatever they basically want, what their current footprint is. And this is something we want to address because like only with comparable numbers, we will be able to talk about best practices and how to optimize and yeah, more efficiently reduce the footprint and decarbonize the industry.Gaël Duez (25:02)Maria, there is something that I don't understand. Most of these companies, they are pretty big. they already, they should already report carbon audit. mean, especially if they're European based or even in some states in the US, you've got now compulsory carbon reporting following GSG protocol or other protocol in France. So how come that the numbers are not comparable?Maria Wagner (25:08)Yeah. It's because these reports are based on the greenhouse gas protocol so far. mean, there is the corporate sustainability reporting directive in Europe, which is based on the ESRS. But the problem is it's not game specific. So basically, when you do your reporting, the framework and methodology is so vague, it leaves so much room for you to make decisions andadapt your numbers, that in the end you get non-comparable results. for example, up until now, companies could leave out category 11, the use of the product. And it's like in gaming, a huge part of the mission.Maria Wagner (26:15)If companies leave this out, the numbers are not comparable.Ben (26:18)Yeah. The reason I think that a lot of that happens is that again, because games like they like the games industry relies on these larger tech platforms. Like there's not a lot of direct to consumer sales of games, right? It all goes through the steam or the app store or that's about it. Really. There's no buying a game directly from the producer. Usually there's like a platform between you.And so what that's meant is that most of the companies have been like, well, I didn't design the Xbox. I didn't design the PlayStation. So that energy profile is like outside of my control. So I guess they just decide, and this is like open to them based on the interpretation of the greenhouse gas protocol that yeah, use for sold products. That's not my responsibility. It's actually the console owners responsibility. like Microsoft's or Sony's responsibility.It ends up with this situation where there are large parts of the games industry that are number one, just not being added up, they're not being calculated properly. And then number two, we have no plan for how to reduce them. No real actionable strategy for how to get to net zero in the games industry.Gaël Duez (27:26)There is no in the SBTi framework any specific guidelines for the gaming industry. Not at all.Ben (27:37)I don't believe so, no.Gaël Duez (27:38)And could you share another example? Is there any discrepancies or way of calculating that creates so incomparable reports?Ben (27:52)well, I think a lot of it just comes down to it not being a practice for lots of games companies, right? yes, it is quite surprising that a lot of the big companies aren't disclosing, that is changing over time, but, quite a lot of the biggest game companies, if you think about like Nintendo, based in Japan, Japan doesn't yet have a mandatory,reporting standards. Nintendo actually does disclose quite a bit, but there are lots of other Japanese games companies, South Korean games companies, North American games companies as well that it's just not, hasn't been on their radar. No one, guess, has really asked them to do this reporting yet.Maria Wagner (28:32)Maybe one more thing is, so the problem is there are so many different components within the value chain. I think this is something which is really special that the greenhouse gas protocol does not provide the boundaries between the different service providers. So we have, for example, ads, right? Like if you have a mobile game and it's free to play and you have all the ads.which are played during the gameplay. There is no clear definition of who is responsible for the emissions of this ad which are played during your game. And this is just like one example of how many different companies are involved within the value chain. And because the boundaries are so unclear, you have completely incomparable numbersBen (29:25)And the same goes too for game engine makers. most modern games are made on a software platform. They're made in Unity or they're made in Unreal. And so there you go. You're like, OK, well, I don't have control over Unity. I don't have control over Unreal. Is it really my responsibility to do something about the efficiency of my software? Or what are the levers that I even have? It's not visible within any of them yet.you know, what you're actually asking of your end user and their energy consumption, you know, and this could be millions of people that you're potentially selling and playing your game.Gaël Duez (30:02)That's a beautiful example, Ben, because I've done a bit of research and actually there is a third solution named Godot. And that's a bit insane without any piece of data, I think it's something 60 gigabytes of data just to install Unreal.And then you've got this other game engine called Godot, and it's 160 megabytes. So it's just insane the difference.So it seems that for a developer working in the game industry or a small studio, there are some leewayOr am I completely misunderstanding the issue here, Ben?Ben (30:45)No, I think that's right.It's hard to know exactly because it's just never been part of the culture to really think about the performance. I mean, it has been for specific platforms. Like you need to hit your target. You know, maybe the new call of duty will have a frames per second target of 60 frames per second on, you know, this specific kind of hardware thing. And so they will always like push the limit right up to their, you know, squeezing as many pixels and stuff as you can.But yeah, there are absolutely alternatives that use less space, less power, less like resource intensive, less taxing on the player's device. And, you know, if you just take a different artistic approach, you take a game development methodology, basically, you you develop something smaller, you're not making a big blockbuster here. If you're an indie developer and you're working in a small team,You don't need all the features of Unreal. You're not going to need them all.Maria Wagner (31:44)I I think this is also like the exciting part of our work that because it's so new to the industry, there are so many low hanging fruits and potential because like people just have not looked into this topic much. And yeah, that's the exciting part about it.Gaël Duez (32:02)How easy do you believe the change in mindset will be?Ben (32:05)I mean, it's partly mindset, but it's also partly the business model that the games industry has used and relied on to sell games. that approach to marketing the game as being the newest, biggest, brashest, most advanced game andyou know, selling a new game every couple of years, right? And you're, moving on to the next project, you know, as soon as your game is out, at least until fairly recently when with the advent of games as a service, a lot of the games, you know, they would just get shipped and then you start the next project immediately. So there's nothing really to optimize or there's no chance even to, to optimize in the development cycle for saving money in the servers, unless you are running a game like Fortnite or something with big servers. And then, yeah, that's, think where it's probably starting to happen.Gaël Duez (32:59)And where things are starting to move, because you mentioned several times the business models, but we talk more and more about streaming game. We can also see that some, maybe a fraction, I don't know how big it is, but of the gaming industry is focusing or refocusing on the narrative, the beauty of the story and the beauty of the gameplay rather than the beauty of the game itself. So.Are these trends potent or are they still marginal? And what is changing in the industry that could positively impact the reduction of its environmental footprint?Maria Wagner (33:36)I think actually that the industry is getting more mature at the moment because of the problems it has been through or is still in. I think before the eyes were also not on the industry that much. So there has been this discussion within the industry, are games political?or not, you know, do we have a responsibility as game developers to be political? And I think it also goes into do we have a responsibility to decarbonize or is this up for our service providers and the politicians to deal with that topic? And I think at the moment there is a change that the industry is getting more more mature and is ready to take on more responsibility.Just because we have on the one hand the regulation and also politics are getting more and more interested in games and what is going on on the platforms. yeah, I think also the society is now a little bit more aware that that the games industry is a huge industry. And before...they were able to just be something on the side and be not heard of.Gaël Duez (34:55)It's the number one media today, maybe with video streaming, but I'm not even sure. think video gaming is bigger than video streaming. And just to bounce back on what you've said, I've never heard about a single cultural product which is not political per se. By not willing to be political, it is political, it means that it's just conservative. And I guess if you look at the story of Call of Duty,Gaël Duez (35:22)It's just a living recruitment ad for the US Army and it has been copycat by almost all the armies around the world for recruiting purpose. So it is very political what you put in the game.So let's play a game, pun intended. Let's say that we are a team of a small indie studio, because big, big cooperation, it's a different story. And we are, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 people in the room. And we are brainstorming And we're saying, OK, what are the top three thingsthat we should consider changing or we should consider start doing to truly make our games sustainable.According to you, would be the three things that a small indie studio should consider?Ben (36:16)certainly I think the top one is to support older hardware because that's the big challenge, right? A lot of the games industry, we have the solutions, we just need to kind of implement them so we can buy renewable electricity and we can run our servers on renewable electricity.do digital downloads renewably as well, but when it comes to hardware, that's just always going to have a huge emissions and huge other environmental footprint attached. doing things to opt out of the hardware upgrade cycle to make devices last longer, I think is the number one thing for a small team to do.Maria Wagner (36:57)I actually would agree when it comes to that and my number two would be get in touch with other studios who are already working on the topic because like I still think that at the moment the industry is barely connected when it comes to sustainability and games and there are a lot of great examples out there.And of course, yeah, like talk to us because we can provide you with the tools to measure your impact.Gaël Duez (37:32)you mentioned several times the framework or actually the tools that the SDA can provide to anyone in the gaming industry to help get better measurement or calculation. you want to say something about it.Ben (37:49)Thanks Gael. at the SGA our main mission is to produce a methodological standard for how we measure, how we collect the data and how we calculate the end greenhouse gas burden of making games, of playing games, of selling, distributing games, the whole value chain.we're working on this standard and it's going to be an open source standard. It's going to be open to anyone to use and apply. And we want as much input as possible. Like we're already consulting with lots of games companies. The goal of it really is to just save everyone a whole bunch of time, right?Gaël Duez (38:28)And is it more a tool or a or a framework? Is it like plug and play? That's my first question. You know, you've just dropped numbers from, I don't know, your accounting system or wherever you need those numbers from. Or is it more something that you get your own people trained to understand how to apply this methodology into your company?Gaël Duez (38:53)That will be my question number one and my question number two, because it might be a bit related, is how connected is this work that you're doing with the GHG protocol or other, I would say, meta protocol or meta way of measuring the footprint?Ben (39:09)So it is a little hard to describe because it is a work in progress. We obviously have massive big vision for it. We want it to be like the kind of plug and play thing. You can just like connect it up to all your existing systems. But at the moment, it's just a set of methodologies and some spreadsheets that I've made to kind of test the methodologies and.and work as a tool for people who maybe don't have anything to use at the moment.Maria Wagner (39:36)I mean, basically, our goal is to help the games companies to comply with CSRD. So the methodology sits on the baseline of the greenhouse gas protocol and the ESRS. So it is basically helping the games companies to understand all this blurry lines.which the greenhouse gas protocol leaves open at the moment. So what we are doing with this at the moment spreadsheets and supportive numbers is that we reduce the time and efforts of the companies to doing the research themselves and also to be alone making this decision, decisions which are going into the reporting.For example, what is material for my studio? This is something which you cannot put into a spreadsheet or a calculation. This is something which you need to decide case by case. And what we are doing is we helping the industry to have this conversations and decide basically what is material and what is not. So they're not alone.At the moment, this legislation is still a moving target. So it would be stupid to now develop like a tool, right? Because it would be outdated in two months. So it's kind of a moving target. And we are offering a community with experts discussing all these topics. like this poor...reporting sustainability managers are not alone having to make these decisions, but that they can basically connect with each other, exchange knowledge, and in that sense, save themselves time and share best practices.Gaël Duez (41:30)So I've got a better understanding of what is currently offered by the sustainable gaming aliens and the big vision I would say. So thanks a lot both of you. I think we have some sort of an action plan now with the brainstorming exercise plus the explanations you provided with the SGA methodology.Maria Wagner (41:53)And when it comes to the story, I...wanted to add on that a little bit. Of course, it always depends on what kind of game you're developing. But sometimes the stories within games are very focused on extraction of goods. I think game developers should just like, but I think most of the game developers do, just be more aware of what kind of storydo you convey to your players? Does it always have to be gather everything and throw it away afterwards? Does it need to be this extraction? Because there are already more and more games which are keeping that in mind, that there is always a cost to extraction. But this is something which is quite new, I would say.Gaël Duez (42:47)Yeah, we should create an extension to Age of Empire, where actually when you ran out of mine, you know, and especially gold or whatever, it's not like stable because it happens, you know, I was always very shocked when I used to play with this game that, okay, it's over. You know, we collected everything on the map and it's over and you stay at the same level of civilization and it should be like an immediate drop back to...prehistorical age, like you don't have the gold to pay whatever the resources are. Boom, end of game, end of civilization. But I got your point that the philosophy of being a bit more aware of how our biosphere works and that it's not just extract, extract and strike and then the game is over because actually in the real world, we don't want the game to be over.Gaël Duez (43:39)Ben, you want to add another action?Ben (43:42)It's probably a little bit less relevant for small indie studios, but it's still something they can do. it's actually something that the Microsoft Xbox sustainability team pioneered. So what they realized is that there is a lot of waste in games, a lot of wasted energy. When players are sitting on a menu screen because they're in between rounds or they've gone off to make acup of tea or get some food or whatever. You don't need to be pushing all those pixels on a idle state, right? So, and they worked with a couple of different studios, big studios, small studios. And they realized that, yeah, if you just shave a few frames per second off the menu screen and you lower the resolution,you can save a substantial amount of power from that device while it's in that state. And I think the result for Epic Games who make Fortnite was in the order of megawatt hours of power a day, just from this one change. So if you've got a really big audience, you can make a big impact.And that's pretty amazing because it's user aware electricity consumption. Like if no one is actually using the game, no need to consume crazy amount of energy if I follow you right here. But could we envision a word when we move a step forward with carbon aware? Like if I know that my electricity grid is highly carbonized at the moment because of the time of the day or because where I am, I will...offer my user to maybe play with a lower quality or resolution being a bit degraded Or is it something that at least at the R &D stage, like not being rolled out already, is something considered on it's a bit of a taboo, like all the time best services ever should be delivered to our user?Ben (45:38)I think it's possible. It's definitely achievable. I think the barriers there are actually just cultural. is like, we've always got to have the most powerful, most beautiful image. And we are starting to see attitudes in gamers change. A bit of research done in 2021, think, asked gamers, a thousand gamers in the US, likeBen (46:04)a whole bunch of climate and sustainability related questions. And even then, a majority of them said, yeah, the games industry has a responsibility to reduce its emissions. So I think players are starting to be aware of this. it's up, it's at the point where we just need to connect those desires with the solutions that developers already have.Maria Wagner (46:26)I'm just thinking, it wasn't the eco mode version, like the Fortnite event, what they did. I mean, it was playing with reduced frame rate, as far as I know, but there was no study done how the players received it, right?Yeah, I'm not aware of, I can't remember what was in the white paper. They have a published white paper that you can go look at and see. But I think the goal mainly there was to be as unobtrusive as possible. It's really not a thing yet in the games industry to connect with those gamers that do have those green impulses and make use of them.Maria Wagner (47:12)Also, sorry to add on that, I definitely think that there is the potential and for like an indie game studio, in that sense, I would say the number one thing would be to get together with others and put pressure on the big service providers, the platforms, or not pressure, but like working with them together to decarbonize the whole industry.Because I think if we see the big picture and we have comparable numbers, it will be way easier to decarbonize as a whole industry than one studio doing little tweaks.Gaël Duez (47:51)Before closing the podcast, know that you've already shared some resources, but is there any other resources on top of the SGA and your book, Ben, that you'd like to share that could be very, very useful for a tech worker in the gaming industry?Maria Wagner (48:07)I think at the moment we are also shooting a bunch of different interviews with industry experts. And I think it's actually interesting to hear what is happening there. So this is definitely something I encourage people to look into because we are interviewing the different sustainability managers with their challenges and solutions within the industry.we are really coming from the industry and the solutions we design are for the game developers, like really for people working at the games and which will be applicable. like Yirik Kupyainen, who is one of the founders and had won the ideas, is an engineer himself. He had a bunch of likeMaria Wagner (48:55)companies within the industry. also, Petri Jerviletto is one of the co-founders of Remedy, who is backing us. And of course, also David Helgeson, the founder of Unity. So we are backed by industry experts.Gaël Duez (49:15)So thanks a lot for these extra resources and extra explanations on what you're trying to achieve with the SGA. Now, traditionally, and this time I will make no exception, I love to close the podcast with a positive note. So I would like to ask both of you, what is the positive piece of news that you would like to share regarding sustainability and maybe even sustainability in the gaming industry?Ben (49:41)well, yeah, so I was really encouraged by the recent publication in, think it was a nature journal, looking at the effect of what, I guess what we might consider the more extreme climate protesters was on public sentiment. I think they ran a study on the public public opinion after like before and after the just up oil intervention that I think threw some soup on the, on one of those artistic works.And the result was actually that rather than like harming the cause or anything actually it the support for more moderate climate sustainability action rose after those sort of extreme interventions. So I thought that was really encouraging. It just made me want to like go out and do the Andreas Malm thing and blow up a pipeline.Maria Wagner (50:31)Yeah, I think it's very encouraging to see that more more companies are reporting on their scope three emissions because of course on the one hand they have to anyway because of the European regulations but it's encouraging to see that also a lot of companies doing that like out of free will.and that we get more and more data within the market. And because of that, it is also more and more clear that we need to have more refined methodologies and that we are basically all connected because I think many times we think we can sweep over the responsibility to someone else. But when it comes to solving climate change or decarbonizing the industry,It's really about working together. yeah, think, yeah, seeing more and more companies disclosing their scope three emissions is something which will help to recognize that.Gaël Duez (51:34)So transparency in working together. I think that could be the tagline of this episode.Maria Wagner (51:39)Yeah, yeah, yeah, actually, yeah.Gaël Duez (51:42)So thanks a lot both of you for joining the show. I think I will very carefully consider which kind of device I will buy to put under the Christmas tree.As I said in the introduction, that's a sector I absolutely have no clue on how it works. So I learnt a lot thanks to both of you. once again, it was great to have you on the show and I hope that we will keep on having a very interesting discussion.Ben (52:07)Thanks, Gael. It's great.Maria Wagner (52:08)Thank you, thank you,Gaël Duez (52:11)Thank you for listening to this Green.io episode. If you enjoyed it, share it and give us five stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. We are an independent media relying solely on you to get more listeners. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with a colleague or a relative working in the tech industry is also highly efficient to switch more responsible technologists in action mode. In our next episode,We will welcome Annie Freeman, who's based in New Zealand. Full disclosure, I'm completely biased with this country. And we will deep dive into a concrete use case, the building of an internal product in our company to calculate carbon emissions of each software component of each team using data from Climatic. Stay tuned. By the way, Greenire is a podcast in much more.So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. Paris is in less than three weeks from now, on December 3rd, 4th, and 5th. You can still get a free ticket using the Vulture Greenio VIP.Just make sure to have one before the remaining 33 tickets are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world, Roxane (53:42)one byte at a time.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

Holly and Will Alpine, former Microsoft employees, reveal their eye-opening journey within the tech giant's Azure division. They discuss the troubling concept of 'enabled emissions' and how it clouds Microsoft's sustainability claims. Their departure from the company was fueled by concerns over its partnerships with fossil fuel industries, undermining genuine environmental efforts. The Alpiners advocate for transparency and greater accountability in big tech, emphasizing the urgent need for regulations to ensure responsible practices in an increasingly digital world.

Holly Alpine, former head of Microsoft’s sustainability initiatives, and William Alpine, an AI product manager focused on eco-friendly practices, share their journey within Microsoft’s Azure division. They reveal the tension between tech expansion and sustainability, discussing their grassroots initiative that boasts over 10,000 employees. Topics include the complexities behind enabled emissions, the significance of community investments, and the challenge of aligning corporate goals with actionable sustainability objectives. Their insider perspective sheds light on the pressing need for transparency in big tech's environmental claims.

Today, we don’t have 1 or 2 guests but 12! In partnership with the YouTube channel Architect Tomorrow, we are glad to share with you snippets and interviews of the speakers who made the latest Green IO Conference in London a huge success last month. I have no idea if you have some appetite for this kind of content so feel free to come back to me at contact@greenio.tech or just comment on our posts on social media. One last thing, the audio quality is ok but not great because of the noise at the venue. If this episode gets some success, we will try to find a quieter place and better gear for the next editions of Green IO starting with Green IO Paris on December 4th and 5th. Still, I hope you’ll enjoy this episode as much as we enjoyed crafting Green IO London 2024 for its attendees. ❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents.