A month ago, Google released its 2024 sustainability report. Its overall water consumption increased by 28% in a year.  Less publicized than the data center energy boom, water is also pivotal for the Tech industry and data is even scarcer.  
To better understand this secret but serious love affair between big tech and water, what better location to investigate than its birth place? Yes. THE silicon valley. And no one there is better qualified to explore the topic than Masheika Allgood who lives in Santa Clara and recently created a Data Center Water Consumption Calculator based on public data. Over their conversation, Gael Duez and her covered: 

• The astonishing amount of water used by data centers in California and why it could have been even worse
• “Back to the loop” & the limits on the efficiency gain from new cooling technics
• Air pollution & the trade-off of heat reuse in urban area
• The unignorable noise pollution
• How big tech lawyers have an edge on city council and community activism 

And much much more!
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Learn more about our guest and connect: 

• Masheika’s LinkedIn
• Green IO website 
• Green IO Slack
• Gaël Duez's website 
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   
Masheika's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• American Lung Association Study - Fine Particle Pollution
• Santa Clara Data Centers
• Santa Clara has as many data centers as Ireland
• Data Center Water Calculator Explainer
• Closed loop cooling systems
• Memphis air quality
• Generators as primary source of energy
• Generator shortage
• Google 2025 Sustainability Report
• Data centres allegedly draining scarce water supplies
  
  

Transcript (auto-generated)Masheika Allgood (00:02)Okay, so let me say that a 100 megawatt data center, system is gonna require 223, I hate to say it, because it sounds insane, but 223 million liters of water in the system just to get the cooling requirements. That's the spin up the system. And then it runs through three million liters of consumed water every day.
Gaël Duez (00:32)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, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. A month ago, Google released its 2024 Sustainability Report. Its overall water consumption increased by 28 % year on year. The good news is that location-wise water withdrawal and consumption data were made available. Water being even more difficult to transport than electricity, how aquifers are used by its different consumers impacts a lot the local communities. And data centers are not the last to consume water.
Ask our British friends, who recently discovered, thanks to a combined work from Foxglove and The Times, that 231 English data centres consume the equivalent per year of almost 4,000 Olympic swimming pools. But they also discovered that this figure is completely underestimated, because over half of British water companies have no clue how many data centres they supply, nor how much water they are hoovering up. I'm quoting here Donald Comble of Foxglove. To better understand this secret but serious love affair between Big Tech and Water, what better location to investigate than its birth place? Yes, the Silicon Valley. And no one there is better qualified to explore the topic than Masheika Allgood. Masheika has already lived several lives. As a lawyer, as a techie, For instance, her team at NVIDIA wrote the software managing AI training, and now as an activist. She recently made a big splash, pun intended, by creating a data center water consumption calculator based on public data and open hypothesis. So, welcome to the show, Masheika It's really an honor to have you with us today.
Masheika Allgood (02:50)I really appreciate you having me on. This is a really cool opportunity, so thank you.
Gael Duez (02:57)Well, I think we have, as I said in the introduction, I mean, you've lived several lives. I think I've got like half a hundred questions before once. And that might shock my usual listeners. I'd like to start right from the start with a provocative question playing a bit the devil advocate here. And no, I'm not going to turn into some clashes, stupid YouTuber, you know, to get more clicks and likes and what nots. But I would like to put this question on the table first, maybe to evacuate it fast. So you're someone who's deeply engaged. Again, the water consumption of data centers in the Bay Area, and we're going to develop this. But my question would be, do you consider yourself as a NIMBY, not in my backyard person, or actually that will be a very wrong way to describe what you're actually doing?
Masheika Allgood (04:00)So I don't think this should be in anyone's backyard. So I don't think it's gonna be so separate. Yeah, so I live in California. I live in the Bay Area, but I'm from Florida. And Florida is one of the wettest states in the US. So I grew up with rain as a regular feature in my life. And I moved to California at the tail end of 2014, which was in the midst of like a 10 year drought cycle.
Gael Duez (04:04)I was expecting this answer!
Masheika Allgood (04:30)So my first couple years here, it never rained, like at all. It was freaky. Like I had friends who were like recording the rain and like sending me clips and it was like, my God. Like I just, I missed rain. had never been anywhere that just didn't rain. And it just, it was a surreal experience. And when it started raining, I was like, ⁓ this is what that is. Wow, how cool, right? And so I didn't understand the concept of water scarcity because I came from a place where there's ocean there, there's lakes and the intercoastals, like a river on the inside. There's water everywhere. When you drive, you always see water. And I come to California and like there was no drops of water anywhere. You're always hearing drought. Everything was brown. My wife laughs because I thought they called it the Golden State because it was brown. Because when we drove everywhere, like all the grass was like golden. I thought that was it. I knew the real reason, but for some reason my brain supplanted it and she laughs to this day. But water scarcity is a real thing in the US and in California and specifically. We've had massive fires over the last couple of years, all up and down the West Coast. These horrific like looks like the world is ending kinds of landscapes from fires. So water is a real issue here. It's the states. And so people don't necessarily consider those things. But when I realized and when I learned that data centers take drinking water, it just, all of my alarm bells went off and it became a cause for me. You mentioned in your intro, you called me an activist.
Masheika Allgood (06:24)It's a term that I'm not fully comfortable with because I'm more of an educator of activists, right? Like I'm not all that great with people like those who like me, like me. I lead amongst, you know, in certain situations, but there are people who they can mobilize communities and they're true activists and I try to assist them in what they do. But with this, this is the first time I was pushing, like, hey, activists, this is something you might want to do ⁓ because it's of critical importance, not just in my neighborhood, but water scarcity is an issue all across the globe.
Gael Duez (07:06)Thanks a lot for the clarification about not being an activist yet being very active, would say. so if we try now and, and thanks for the clarification about the not in my backyard, meaning actually not in anyone's backyard. I was expecting this answer, but I'd rather have you clarifying it.
Masheika Allgood (07:11)Yeah.
Gael Duez (07:28)Now, how come that it is such a pressing issue in California? mean, do you have a lot of data centers? Obviously, this is a paradise for tech companies, so we could expect, but it's very abstract for lot of people. What are the order of magnitude? Maybe some people know about Virginia and, you know, data center alley near Ashburn but how bad is it? Regarding the concentration of computing powers and how bad is it regarding the water consumption? Could you provide us some meaningful numbers just to grasp something that is pretty blurry in everyone's mind starting with mine?
Masheika Allgood (08:09)So I live in Sunnyvale. I can walk. ⁓ I don't know how you do it in metrics, but I can walk about 10 minutes from my front door and I'm in Santa Clara, right? Santa Clara is the seat of Silicon Valley. The county I'm in is the home of Silicon Valley. There are 55 data centers in Santa Clara.
Gael Duez (08:18)hahahaha
Masheika Allgood (08:37)Along this one little narrow strip, like this is the home of tech, which means data centers started here first, right? Because you needed them to build the tech companies, right? It's symbiotic relationship. The 55 data centers we have in Santa Clara makes us the largest concentration of data centers in the US outside of Loudon, Virginia, which is number one. So it's, we talk a lot about second in the US where we're tops in the world, like we're in the top 15 in the world in terms of concentration because the US has way more data centers than anyone else. So us being the second largest in the US makes us a player on the global stage when it comes to data center concentration. The difference with our Santa Clara data centers is we've been doing this here for decades, right? And so the vast majority of those data centers are not AI data centers. We're more recently building AI specific data centers, which are the ones that are most consumptive. Also, California and we do some things right here. So we have a cap in California. You can't build a data center larger than 99 megawatts. Companies are trying to get around that by building like two or three 99 megawatt data centers on a campus came. But we'll never build anything as big as say the massive one they built in Memphis ⁓ or some of the ones they built in Atlanta. The big super huge mega data centers cannot be built in California. Our structure doesn't allow it.
Gael Duez (10:14)How come that this cap exists because it sounds a bit counter-intuitive in the country of big tech? I mean, this is not the first time I hear it. You have it in Singapore until recently. It was lifted recently, but you had it for several years. I know that in Ireland, the electricity regulators basically put a ban on any new data centers if they're not self-powered which brings a lot of questions regarding building gas powered how come that this legislation was in place for less than 100 megawatts?
Masheika Allgood (10:51)So California is an anomaly and I think the world should be a little grateful that the tech started We're anomalous in the US when you look across our spectrum of how we handle industry and politics. So California has to a greatest extent tried to walk the fine line between innovation and responsibility. We aren't the best at it. We learned some things during fire season that we've not done all that great with our water. But industry-wise, we have tried to be reasonable and walk the line because California is one of the bread baskets of the U.S. We grow more food here than almost any other state. We have some of the most fertile land in the U.S. And so you have to make provisions for farmers to have water as well as, you know, industry.
Gael Duez (11:42)So the cap was related already to water consumption more than energy consumption, the 99 megawatt.
Masheika Allgood (11:52)I might have say that because we have a variety of industries. So it wasn't just a water thing. That's just my focus of it. That was the benefit. ⁓ But no, we've we've had the cap for a while. I wasn't part of that legislation. I can't speak to the impetus, but I know that we in a variety of areas have been trying to walk this line between innovation and responsibility to the public and to other industries. So because we're
Gael Duez (11:54)Okay. Okay, got it.
Masheika Allgood (12:20)We're a massive state. We've got a lot of competing interests. We've been pretty good about not allowing any one interest to take all the things. So our farmers are always protesting they don't have enough water, right? Our techies are always protesting they don't have enough power. Everyone's always protesting, but everyone's always getting business done. So like, if everyone's unhappy, you're probably doing it right kind of thing. So that's kind of where we landed. I don't know why they chose 99 megawatts, but I am so grateful that they did. Anything larger, we'd in a much different situation.
Gael Duez (12:53)Let's go back to the water consumption ⁓ 99 max megawatt data centers, do they consume a lot of water? this is a question that was actually asked by some listeners on the Green IO Slack workspace what is the cooling techniques and how do you explain such a big water consumption from data centers? Specifically here in California or in Santa Clara.
Masheika Allgood (13:19)Okay, so let me say that a 100 megawatt data center, oh, let me put it in liters for your audience. system is gonna require 223, what's that? Oh, no, that's pretty crazy. I hate to say it, because it sounds insane, but 223 million liters of water in the system just to get the cooling requirements. That's the spin up the system. And then it runs through three million liters of consumed water every day. So like the system cycles through that 200 million and then as it cycles through it consumes either through drift, so the little particles flowing away, evaporation or blow down, which is like the water that has gotten too heavy with sediments or too polluted and they have to like push it out of bottom of the system. So that's like 1.5 % of the water that is in the system every day is consumed, right? And so every day it's consuming around three million gallons of water, or liters of water, I'm sorry, gallons is different. So I got those numbers from my data center water consumption calculator that I built. I basically, no one had any numbers and I was like, someone has to have numbers because you can't keep relying on the tech companies because they're not being forthcoming. So is there a calculation that isn't specific to that industry or isn't specific to that particular data center? Then you'd have to like talk to the operator. But is it like some wild fantasy numbers? Is there something grounded that is respected in the industry? And the Uptown Institute is an organization that basically certifies data center sustainability. And it's not sustainability as in you're good for the planet. It's in sustainability of operations. Can you operate in case of loss of connection either to the grid or the public water supply? How long can you operate? So they have this makeup water calculation, which basically determines if you can keep running within 24 hours, right? or for 24 hours or for 12 hours, how long your systems can run without connection to water. So it's at the design phase and it's based on the power output of the system. So there's some assumptions made, right? And we can argue those assumptions, which is perfect. Like that's the point. You want to be able to argue those assumptions and tell me that your stuff is more efficient. But the assumptions are reasonable assumptions that are accepted within the industry. And based on those reasonable assumptions, that's what the water calculator calculates. So those are your baseline numbers. Your question was, what about more efficient methods? And that's where things get interesting. ⁓ So there's really kind of three different methods that people are touting as efficient. And your first is going to be direct liquid cooling. So instead of… running a closed loop of liquid through the back of the server, I actually put a little connection on the back of the GPU and I squirt water specifically on the hot spots to try to cool the hole because some spots get way hotter than other spots. So I just shoot water directly on it. So it's less water intensive. So that's the first option. The thing about that option, so I'll tell what the option is and why we have difficulty determining how efficient it is. It's supposed to be significantly more efficient, right? But we don't have numbers at scale, right? Like we're not looking at 100,000 GPU installation, which is what some of these data centers have. So we don't have numbers at that level of scale. ⁓ And I'm not exactly sure like if that water is reusable. So they're shooting the water in, it's going into some sort of repository and then being cooled and then coming back to the system. But if it goes through that kind of process, then it's going to have the same problem as any other liquid cooling, which is there's a heat exchange loop. So the loop where you're pushing up against the server or against the chip is closed. That is a closed loop, nothing gets lost in that process. But you got to cool it. At some point, that water, that liquid goes through and gets cooled. It's that cooling loop that's the problem because typically that's evaporative cooling. We all know evaporative cooling is massively consumptive and that's essentially what the calculator is built on, is evaporative cooling. If you have a water tower and use a chiller, then this is what your water consumption will be.
Gael Duez (17:53)Okay.
Masheika Allgood (18:07)If your new efficient system still uses a water tower, it's only so efficient. And so we're not getting the numbers of how, what's the efficiency of the cooling loop, right? We're just getting, but it's using less water on the chip. So that's one new method that we just don't have numbers on.
Gael Duez (18:28)I'd like to pause here and to rewind a bit just to make things clear for everyone. So in the Bay Area, obviously, you don't use air cooling. You need water cooling, I guess. And you mentioned it several times, but most of the time, this is closed loop cooling, which means that the water is getting reused several times. And then at some point when it's getting either too hot or too polluted, it gets throw back into the system. Is it correct? Just to clarify.
Masheika Allgood (18:59)Okay, so first off, we can't use air cooling in most of the world because you need the temperatures outside to be cooler than the temperatures in the data center. And I don't know if anyone's noticed, it's really hot in the world right now. So that's tough. So that's like free air cooling, And then when it comes to actually like, I'm running fans, it's very difficult giving the heat these GPUs put off.
Gael Duez (19:04)Yeah. Really?
Masheika Allgood (19:23)for fans to be very efficient. So it becomes very electricity intensive. So there's this trade off between electricity and water. I use less water, which means I use more electricity and we know carbon and that has its own issues. this is why I say, ⁓ always, always. So there's no math reason for them to make that choice, but then it doesn't benefit society if they do.
Gael Duez (19:25)Plus cost, guess energy costs are higher than water costs for many operators. Yeah.
Masheika Allgood (19:50)So this is why I'm not in anyone's backyard. There's no good answer for this, right? So, okay, so it'll go through the loop and that loop is closed. The issue is you have to cool the loop and you can either cool that loop through air, which is more electricity, or you can cool it through water, which is water consumption. So in California and the Bay Area and pretty much in every data center, you have this issue of how do you cool the loop? And you really have two options, kind of three if you live in a colder environment, let the air cool it. But very few data centers are in that area. And so that whole, when the water goes bad, it goes down, that's through the cooling loop, right? Because the other loop is closed. So we're not throwing any of that away until it's like ridiculous, right? But when I'm evaporative cooling, then that system has a loop, right? And we're pushing water through and it goes to the top and it evaporates and we're just forwarding water on the other liquid to make it cool. It's a whole process. But yeah, that loop, some of that water gets recycled and you have to Blow down that water. there aren't very good answers, right? So if I use direct to liquid cooling, that's less water in that closed loop. But, the questions are, so how does that recycled? Like, is that water cooled? Like, we just don't know enough about the entire life cycle of that process. There's also the, can I put it in the ocean or a deep body of water? That was tried by several different companies, but the chips run so hot they were impacting the ecosystem in the body of water. So that can't be, you can't be heating up, you know, your cool lakes and killing all the fish and birds. So that didn't work out. So then it became, can we cool it in a body of liquid? And that is kind of like the new thing. I submerge it in a body of liquid? And so there's, yeah. So there's, there's issues of PFAS chemicals, so like the types of chemicals they submerge it in. So your environmental folks are worried because if that gets out into the environment, it's disastrous. But there's also the issue of you can submerge it, but it gets hot and it has to be cooled. So you still go through the process if you have to have a cooling system. when we talk about more efficient, I don't doubt that they are more efficient than just straight evaporative cooling but we don't have numbers on what more efficient means. And this is the danger, because people say more efficient as if it's efficient enough. But since they're not telling us how much water they're pulling from specific aquifers, we don't know what efficient enough is, right? So like if you're 5 % more efficient, but you're overdrawn the aquifer by 20 % of its capacity, is that sufficient? No. But can we do that math externally? No. And so this is my concern with efficiency methods, is they're not based on anything.
Gael Duez (23:01)And there is a clearly a full line of questions that I'm going to ask you about having access to this number of transparency and so on. But I'd like to stay with this efficiency discussion for a bit longer, because that was also a question that was pushed by one of my European listener in Europe.
Masheika Allgood (23:15)Thank you.
Gael Duez (23:21)and especially in the coldest place of Europe, we tend to see heat not necessarily as something to be wasted because heat is precious and there are quite a lot of urban areas that could benefit from this heat. And it's not rare now, it's not the majority, but for many new and not necessarily big hyperscaler but like medium sized data centers that they are coupled with a urban heating or, you know, in Paris, they've got a solution heating a swimming pool. I that in Geneva, there is a full district being heated by one data center. There are several examples in the Nordics as well. and this is actually something that you can see in the European energy efficiency directive that how much heat is reused is now compulsory to be reported by data centers because this is something precious. This is energy that we don't necessarily have to waste in the atmosphere. Now, that being said, I live on a tropical island. You live in a hot place as well. This is not necessarily something that we need, but is there any way to be more efficient by not wasted this heat and maybe use it for other human activities like, I don't know, the industry, agriculture, whatever, or is it something that is absolutely not considered?
Masheika Allgood (24:16)No, we're considering it, but there are problems. So San Jose is the city below me. So we consider it like a tri-city area. Our county is three cities. So it's San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale. There are some other cities, but for the purposes of this discussion, those are the three big ones. So San Jose is looking to build housing slash data center complex in the middle of downtown. The issue that we have with it, I am advocating very strongly against it because they were like, but we can reuse the heat within the housing for a variety of purposes. We can put up a greenhouse. It all sounds great until you recognize that all of these data centers run generators, gas or diesel generators on site. And those generators are in California only used for backup power. In Memphis, they're powering the data center itself, right? And the difficulty with generators is they expel small particle pollution, fine particle pollution. So the Bay Area, our Tri-County, plus San Francisco and Oakland, when it comes to air districts, because we have a very unique kind of way that air flows in the South Bay or in the Bay Area, ⁓ our American Lung Association, it's a national organization within the US, they keep a list of like areas that have really bad fine particle pollution. The Bay Area is number seven on that list in the nation, in the entire US for small or for fine particle pollution. So you put up a data center, it has generators, right? The generators are allowed to run, for maintenance purposes.
Gael Duez (26:13)Okay.
Masheika Allgood (26:29)They have to run a certain amount of hours every month, right? So think of 299 of generators.
Gael Duez (26:31)They have to.
Masheika Allgood (26:41)Running monthly in a city or an area that's in a valley, we get these, I forget what they call it, it's like air inversions where basically the air kind of sits over our valley and nothing gets in or out. So the pollution just sits, right? I was talking to someone who had covered the fires and they were like, yeah, so it sits. And then we always knew when the fire would explode, because the air inversion lifted, right? So when you're talking about reusing heat, if you're in a country that doesn't allow as much generators as backups, that might be a viable option. But in the US, generators are not only backing up data centers, they become first source power. So you've got a lot of data centers, which is what they're doing in Memphis. They're building… in areas where the grid isn't sufficient. They can't give them enough power for their operations. So they just use generators as their main source of power until four years later when the grid operator has enough megawatts for them. California, at least in the Bay Area, our data center operators have been building responsibly. Basically, they build as power becomes available. But that's not the case across the entire
Gael Duez (27:39)That's insane.
Masheika Allgood (27:58)There is a run on generators right now. Like electric companies can't get generators for backup because the tech companies have bought so many of them. So they are powering data centers all across the globe with basically dirty energy, right? And the environmental technology you put on top of a generator to make it less polluted, there's a run on that as well. So they're getting the generators without the environmental technology. So there's a lot of irresponsibility going on around how generators are being used. But even if you do it responsibly, we have 55 data centers in Santa Clara, right? and we've got another 15 or 20 in San Jose, and now you want to build 299 megawatt data centers. All of those have to cycle their generators once a month. So that's thousands of generator power cycling.
Gael Duez (28:38)Yeah.
Masheika Allgood (28:55)Every single month. I don't know how much heat makes that worthwhile. Like the air quality is staggering. It's insane to think of us putting that kind of load in a city that already is very high fine particle pollution. So yes, it makes sense when it comes to, we don't want to waste heat, but you have to consider, like none of this isn't a bubble, right? So you have to consider, well. What is powering it? Is air quality a concern? Because if you're having people live in a data center or right next to a data center, because it can't be too far, otherwise you'll lose heat in the pipes, right? So there's only so far away it could be for you to be able to capture that heat. Are there other concerns about having the data center located that close to people? It's not just about heat or electricity. There's a lot of concerns around data center.
Gael Duez (29:50)That's almost a textbook example of pollution transfer and the necessity to have a systemic approach on the ecosystem surrounding a data center. So I guess, but let's not go into this direction, but we could argue that maybe there are better ways to capture the fumes and avoid this air pollution. But let's be honest, today, this is not the case. And while we are talking about
Masheika Allgood (29:55)Yeah.
Gael Duez (30:17)This pollution transfer, You told me when we were preparing the episode, another vibrant example of another pollution that is completely understated and you had a clear example, an anecdote that you told me about. Yeah, there is the issue with the energy consumption, the water consumption. mentioned the air pollution, but actually there is another player in the long list of pollutions and negative side effect of having a data center next to you. Can you bring us the anecdote?
Masheika Allgood (30:49)Noise pollution is brutal for data centers and no one talks about it because it didn't used to be a thing. But data centers, the generators and the cooling, it all puts out noise and it's at a frequency that is at like human talking. So it's not ignorable. So a couple months ago, I was sleeping and I was awakened by this sound. It sounded like
Gael Duez (30:54)Noise pollution. ⁓.
Masheika Allgood (31:18)Electric vehicle, you know, they got the weird engine sound. So it sounded like an electric vehicle, but it wasn't moving. And it went on for like an hour and a it's three in the morning. And I had to leave and like try to sleep in the living room. It was brutal. like, you I went to a county meeting around data centers and the number one thing that the commissioners were talking about is can you handle the noise? We're getting complaints about noise. Can you handle the noise? Headphones don't work, earplugs don't work. It is pervasive and it's brutal. And there are things you can kind of do to help it, but a lot of that stuff sits on top of the data center. So like you can't wall it off. Like it's a, it's a really difficult issue that's becoming more and more known, the larger the data centers get and the closer they get to humanity.
Gael Duez (32:10)And that's a good point that you raise that the logical solution might be, and actually for safety reason as well, let's ground, like, put these data sensors underground, but actually most of the noise comes not from the computing the processor, but more from the heat management. And obviously you need to be able to expel the heat, whether it's with air cooling or water cooling or whatever. And so the noise comes from all the fans, if I understand you well.
Masheika Allgood (32:37)Yeah, the fans and the make just really frustrating noise.
Gael Duez (32:40)The fans and the generator. ⁓
And Masheka, in a previous life, ⁓ you were a lawyer. Am I getting it right? yeah, you were a lawyer. ⁓ When we see all of these downsides and the fact that it seems to affect that many people, the logical question is how, especially in a free country like the US, where you've got a vibrant community scene How come that the data centers seem to have a free pass and they can basically pollute the air, emit a lot of noise, noise pollution, as you mentioned the water, seems that it's very cryptic. It's almost a secret. It requires you spy skill to know how much water is consumed. So what is going on with transparency and accountability from these big tech actors in the US or maybe just in California if you don't want to generalize?
Masheika Allgood (33:33)Yeah. So lawyers are important, but right now the ones who got the head start are the tech lawyers. like ⁓ they understood what was going on way before anyone else did. They had lobbyists in place. And so that's why you see a lot of tech favorable bills that are getting passed in different states. They've been very active with NDAs.
Gael Duez (33:55)Hahaha!
Masheika Allgood (34:12)And telling leaders that they can't speak about things like water usage and consumption and electricity or when they're building and how big they're building. And when you're on the other side, your lawyers don't make as much. You don't have as many of them. Like you're asking for a city or county solicitor to take on a trillion dollar company. It's not that we don't do that. Obviously we do the underdog thing in the U.S. It's well known, but it's underdog for a reason, right? Like those are really hard fights to win. So you've got nonprofits and advocacy organizations kind of tackling that. And we're tallying up wins, but you know, there are little wins here and there, whereas there's a deluge of money coming from the other side that has been doing this for some time. And you can see it by how, know, Texas kind of ran over a couple countries in Europe and Africa. Well, not so much Africa yet, but that's next. ⁓ But they've come in and really sold themselves as being something other than what they are and really started trying to move the laws in their favor. So I mentioned Africa because they recently passed a law. ⁓ I think, I can't remember which country. I think it was Kenya. They have a law. Yeah.
Gael Duez (35:33)I was about to mention Kenya because Kenya tries to a ⁓ lot of big investment in data they've got very low carbon electricity mix. So they try to attract a lot of investment here.
Masheika Allgood (35:43)Yeah, and they've got a very highly educated workforce. Yeah, they're well suited, but they just recently passed a law that basically criminalizes letting out information about water usage of corporate actors. So we're seeing the playbook from the US play out in other countries. And the other issue is there are 300 million people in the U.S. We've got a lot of land. So a lot of stuff happens to groups of people that don't make it to the national stage. So there's this like simmering ground swell against data centers and you're starting to hear it pop up. But like it takes a lot for stuff to hit the national stage in the U.S. unless it's absolutely catastrophic. Right. And we haven't had an aquifer in a major city fail. As of yet. ⁓ And because AI has become an identity marker, like you have to overcome people's love and devotion to the tech in order to have real conversations about, you know, what it's doing to us while we're loving it, right? It's an abusive relationship, essentially. And it takes a lot to overcome, you know, people who are in love and abusive relationships. So that's kind of where we are. So you know, until something either catastrophic happens or something bad enough happens to enough people, it's very hard to get the communal groundswell. And let's just be honest, we got a lot of shit going on in the States right now that you can be up in arms against. It's hard to pick and choose your fight because everything is on fire, right? So real question in
Gael Duez (37:21)I got Figure or that being said, you mentioned on the national level but as far as I understood, the US is a federal state and how come that seems not moving? At least in California where you mentioned it's slightly different, the vision of common good might be slightly different. The population experienced fires to an extent that was almost existential. The drought is something that you mentioned it right at beginning of the episode, something that is lived by everyone all the time. So how come that this topics doesn't come that hot, pun intended, in at least California? is it only explainable by the love big tech and how proud people are to be, you the fifth economic power in the thanks to all these big tech industries being
Masheika Allgood (38:20)So first I'm gonna say, I think our main issues are, we haven't been able to tell the story, right? The fires were largely caused by our electric company, right? PG&E, they paid millions of dollars of damages to people because it was, you we have a direct actor, like they're power lines sparked and that's what caused the fire. So people have a place to put the blame for that. And so it doesn't come back to data centers as a story, right? We know that the US, when it comes to climate change and carbon, it's been very hard to tie that to individual actions every day. I think it's a marketing problem, right? Like we haven't been able to explain to people in a real way that this is a data center issue. Part of that is because we work for tech companies The Bay area, California works for tech companies. if you're not working for one, your cousin is, your friend is, you know, someone who is like most of the tech, jobs have been out here for a very long time. So there's this assumption based on the marketing of tech that we're the good guys, right? Like we've cultivated this marketing over time. And so no one wants to believe, it doesn't even occur to people to believe that what we're doing could be ruining all of us. Like it's such an opposite of what we have been taught and what we've come to know and believe about these companies. Mind you, the luster of that has started to fall off a bit.
Thank you, Elon, for showing the world who we really are in a real way out here. But there was this belief for a long time that tech giants are altruistic and these guys should be running these companies because they're just good human beings. And it's become clear that they can have problematic views. They can be bad people. They can do bad things. And we shouldn't just assume that because they run a tech company that they are good, but those were such coupled identities for so long, right? it's starting to become a thing where we're seeing them as but for a long time, they just rode the wave of tech is good, so they must be good, right? because we don't have real numbers on water consumption, we don't have a real understanding of how carbon for data centers impacts the heat and fires since we can't make a through line of that story, people just haven't seen. But you were asking for positives. I was just in a meeting yesterday with activists and different people who are trying to figure out how we tell that narrative because people are starting to understand it. It just took us some time because, you know, we're out here building cool things, we're we're the good guys. But then Facebook broke the world and we started thinking, huh? maybe we're not so good. it's been a transition of us moving into a reality. But tech has been a dream in this country for a long time. And it's just hard to wake up from it.
Gael Duez (41:13)Yeah, that's a very good point because, know, the US situation is really specific with so much money poured by the oil industry to create this fog of misunderstanding around climate change, it's really a country that is specific regarding climate change. And from time to time, like, okay, you we've got environmental crises, not just an issue with climate change. So maybe in the US, you should refocus the fight, not against climate change. And my point is, if you focus on water consumption or air pollution, et cetera, eventually you will bump into the same issues, which is if we let main corporate actors treat common goods and the first one being nature and air and water as something that has no price, no value because it has no price and we cannot really seriously address these so-called negative externalities and reincorporate them in the system. I you can pick pretty much crisis that you want, you will get the same solution, like make them accountable, pay the right price for that we pay and that our children will pay, et cetera, et cetera. And this is why maybe in the US, the water, because water is something tangible, carbon is not. Plus carbon is related to energy and the US is a country cultivating the cult of energy. We are energetic people. We are people doing things, etc. mean, there is something almost philosophical here. Water is not. mean, water, you need water. Everyone can understand why you need water to grow a crop and to drink And the same with air pollution and noise pollution. So I was wondering if maybe you could get more traction with these fights that will actually help in any case, the fight against climate change and carbon emissions. seems regarding your answer that it really relates to the narrative framed by big tech companies. Like we are forced for good and we should get a free pass for everything. If I understood well
Masheika Allgood (43:26)essentially articulated why I started Taps Run Dry. Because I had been having this existential crisis about why can't we move forward? And I realized you have to break it down to something tangible. No one's going to think, we're fine without water. Right? So like, that's why I chose water activism. That is specifically the thought process I went through what you just articulated, you have to make it something that is visceral to people. Carbon's not visceral. It just ask Al Gore, he's been beating this drum for like 30 years and it's not moving. It's just, it hasn't landed. So what will land? Water lands. And that's why I specifically sought out water as my area of activism. And then air pollution, same kind of thing. I live in a place where there is higher asthma on average than there is in other places. And we are a very financially viable area of the country to live in. Like people make money out here, but our air quality is horrible, right? that's something we should probably address. And it means something to all of the techies out here who are making massive amounts of money, but their children all have asthma. All right. That's a general statement, but a broad statement, that's why water and air quality have been where I'm hanging my hat.
Gael Duez (44:44)Right. It's really an interesting approach. I've got the feeling that this is a very efficient way to get this little click in people's mind like, ⁓ actually, this is serious. I need to pay attention. And the moment they start to pay attention seriously about it, all the little pieces, they nicely add up. There is almost no U-turn. There is no turning back on the road to sustainability. Once you
you can pose because your mental health is at risk. Or, because your financial situation might force you to do so. But it's almost impossible to go back and say, no, actually, no climate change doesn't exist. And we don't have a water issue, as I thought 20 years ago. know.
Masheika Allgood (45:29)It's going to be a battle, I think you're right. Once people get activated in this particular room, you can't let it go.
Gael Duez (45:37)Well, Mashaika, thanks a lot for joining, for sharing this very specific and grounded fight regarding water consumption plus noise pollution and pollution as well. I've got the feeling that this is not the last time that we talk to each other.
Masheika Allgood (45:54)I'd hope not.
Gael Duez (45:58)Because there are these crazy stories you told me about NVIDIA and before, the ethics that was one of your fight before. I might also ask you to consider talking about this in very concrete ways with these concrete numbers that will be even more precise in a few months, because I think it will be a great talk at Green IO New York 2026 planets are aligned. I would love to see you on stage sharing your findings and your calculators and the way you actually hacked. love it. The Uptight Institute approach, like, hey, let's ask the engineers, but not like how much water do you consume? What are the safety requirements for you to get a good label? And then I'm going to be able to calculate things. Well, that's brilliant. I really love it. So anyway, thanks a lot for joining. I'm really happy that we kickstart the back to school season with this episode and hope to talk to you soon.
Masheika Allgood (46:55)Yeah, thanks for having me. This was great. And yeah, I look forward to future conversation.
Gaël Duez (47:00)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. 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. If you enjoyed this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five 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 and give us some boost in their rankings. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with relatives working in the data center industry or simply being thirsty for information on the topic, I know I should stop doing these jokes. So sharing the episode is always a good idea to provide them with insights on this hot topic. You've got the point. Being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board. In our next episode, we will start exploring a bit the British digital sustainability landscape. After all, Green IO London is in five weeks. We will welcome back Anne Curie
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What does it take to go beyond raising awareness in green software? To avoid checking just boxes? What is required to scale green software practices in a company? 
To discuss these issues, Gaël Duez welcomes Anita Schüttler on this episode “from the trenches”. Anita is a seasoned software engineer and expert on digital sustainability. She works as Head of Sustainability at IT company neuland. Besides, she is a co-chair of the German Bundesverband Green Software, an auditor for the Blue Angel for software and a Champion of the Green Software Foundation. 
Together, they covered many topics including: 

• The Formation of the Bundesverband Green Software
• The CO2 Challenge Project
• Scaling Green Software Initiatives & measuring its success 
• The Challenges in Certification Processes
• The Emotional Roller Coaster of Nonprofit Initiatives

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Anita’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• Digital Collage workshop
• neuland
• Bundesverband Green Software
• Tools landscape that Bundesverband Green Software "tools & measuring" working group put together
• Co2 Challenge des Cyber Forum
• Holmes website
• Blue Angel for resource-efficient software
  
  

Transcript (auto-generated)Anita Schüttler 00:07In IT,  you unplug your servers or you do a deployment and the emissions are gone.  And this is so great.  I think we actually do  have  a  common ground to be ambitious.
Gael Duez 00:26Hello everyone,  welcome to Green.io.  I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world,  one bite 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. What does it take to go beyond raising awareness in green software. To avoid just checking boxes such as inviting a speaker, organizing a digital collage workshop or training some volunteers in eco design. What is required to scale green software practices in a company? To answer these questions, I'm delighted to welcome Anita Schuttler on the show. Anita is a seasoned software engineer and expert on digital sustainability. She works as of Sustainability at IT company Newland. Besides, she is a co-chair of the German Bundeswehrband Green Software, an auditor for the Blue Angel for Software and a champion of the Green Software Foundation. Wow! But what convinced me is Fiona Leinbundgut, our MC at GreenHire Munich this year, introducing Anita to me as a die-hard Green Software engineer. And after exchanging with Anita, I had to add die-hard Green Software Engineer  scaling Green IT from the trenches because she shared several real life examples which were truly inspiring and which she will share with you now.  Hi Anita, thanks a lot for joining Green IO today. 
Anita Schüttler 02:18 Hey Gail, it's so great to be here, thank you. 
Gael Duez 02:19You're welcome, you're welcome. You know,  when  Fiona introduced  us. She mentioned that you were hands-on green IT practitioners.  I think she said something like  hardcore  green software  practitioner or something like that.  So I was like, oh, great. We're going to talk with a lot of use cases from someone being actually in the trenches. And you know how I love this  sort of episodes with feedbacks from people doing things, facing challenges and sharing what works, what doesn't work, et cetera. But then we had a discussion preparing the visit and you mentioned the Bundesverband Green Software. Yes, I managed to pronounce it properly. And I was like, oh my God, I wasn't aware how active this association was and actually launching a pretty big project. So I've got a few questions for you. And if you don't mind, I would love to start with this topic. And maybe my first question would be,  how did you join this association? 
Anita Schüttler 03:23Yeah. So it's called Bundesverband and  it sounds really German. I know you can just call it Green Software Association.  Basically, what did the Green Software Foundation does worldwide? We aim to do on a German level.  So  the Bundesverband is pretty young still actually, it was founded last year.  the story goes like this,  there were some companies who were already working together on this green software topic  and  they wanted to accelerate what they were doing, they wanted to bring it  out to the people and this whole thing didn't get much traction and at some point they said, maybe we have to think this like two steps bigger. Why not create a Bundesverband? this thing, it's, it's, yeah, it's an association. So it sounds like something from the German government or so, but it's not, it's companies coming together and doing this. And we have this for several fields, like AI is one of them as well, or can have any other.  And I was already  talking to those who were  thinking about founding such an association. We were somewhat  being friends with each other or becoming friends. And  when they said, let's found this  association,  I said, we want to be part of this. We want to be one of those companies that join as the first ones. So with my company, neuland and… I asked everyone internally and people were actually pretty excited about this. To sum it up, we're actually a founding member of the Bundesverband Green Software. 
Gael Duez 05:35 Congratulations.  Can individuals join this association or is it only company membership?  
Anita Schüttler 05:38 It's meant as a company membership, but we do have members who are single person companies. So NGO also is fine as well.  Or if they're in academics, they can join. 
Gael Duez 6:00 Okay. You were already doing a lot of green IT stuff. What was the motivation for you more personally to join them?
Anita Schüttler 6:02 Yeah, I was actually really excited about this because it felt like, okay, now we got a movement and now we have something that we can show to everyone and where we can,  uh, put up some big signs and tell people about what green software is. And it looks more official, so to say. Yeah. And it looks like a bigger thing. And we really noticed this when, as soon as we had this association, there was a different kind of speed behind this and more of a push behind this. yeah, that really accelerated a lot of things and moved it to another level than it was before.
Gael Duez  06:42And that might be my thank you, Captain Obvious moment. But  why did you have this need to create a German association? Why not, for instance, creating a chapter of the Green Software Foundation? What drives you to  go more in-depth at the local level? 
Anita Schüttler 07:09Yeah, so Germany is actually pretty active also  in terms of the Green Software Foundation.  For example, we have the most Green Software  champions of any country  within the Green Software Foundation champions.  We also have several meetups. I always join the one at Karlsruhe every month  because it's online and everyone can join bit of an advertisement to  join this Green Software Meetup. And still it felt like the Green Software Foundation was too far away. I think it's very  focused on the English speaking  countries or English speaking community.  it's a pity because there's so much going on in Germany and there's so many people who are interested in this and  really doing things. So we wanted to gather those and get in more companies and people to join us and do something without maybe even without having this barrier of the language. Because when you tell people to say this in English or to communicate in English, many are put off then if they are not this familiar with English as well.  
Gael Duez 08:30I was sort of expecting the answer, but I didn't want to lead the witness and of course the language barrier and the connection to the local ecosystem is super important. And that is also true that we need to think in ecosystem and it's perfectly fine to have large global association, well connected with more local ones, with more specialized ones. You have  some  being launched about AI, for instance, or  e-waste and that's perfectly fine. Thinking in ecosystem is very important, but I just wanted to make sure.  And  so far, so the, Bundeswehrband Green Software is one year old and you've got a pretty big project as far as I know. Can you tell us a bit more about it? You've already advertised it at Green Eye of Munich, but then you've got a second chance. 
Anita Schüttler 09:30So I have to start earlier actually, because this project that we're currently trying to launch has a history already. So as you might know, I'm part of, well, I'm a co-chair at the Bundesverband Green Software. And  my other co-chair  is Aydin Mir Mohammadi. And Aydin is really a pioneer of the first hour and he's  all in  very internally motivated. And he launched  a project in Karlsruhe. So Karlsruhe, if you have no idea, and I had no idea before either is a city that has about 50 % IT companies. So there's a really strong digital ecosystem there. And what Irene did together with others in Karlsruhe is that he went to the local cyber forum it's called there. And together with them, he started a project called CO2 Challenge. So the idea of the CO2 Challenge is that companies commit to reducing 40 % of their digital emissions within one year. And to make this happen, they get a free mentor or mentorship by a person  who will guide them on their first steps.  What do we have here? What can we take a look at? And basically,  what are the low-hanging fruits where we can just, yeah. Turn stuff off or so. This is what we want together with this. And this project has been running in cars for about a year already and it was  really successful. it's,  you know,  there was no,  we measure everything beforehand or whatever. It was really  low entry points. We just count servers or so. So like this, you can't see this right now, but yeah. Rule of thumb. And now the idea is to take this project and scale it to a European level. And  what we want to do is we want to have  coordinators  for at least three European countries. So obviously Germany will be in there, all of Germany this time, not just Karlsruhe.  We already have the Dutch who are very excited about this and want to join. And currently we're still  actually struggling to find a third country. I'm very much hoping for France because they have such a strong ecosystem already. And who knows, maybe we'll find a fourth one even. And then we want to have regional levels, so regional clusters. And those will actually be working with the companies to really make it happen on the local level. And there will need some proper measuring and counting and not just rule of thumb this time. Yeah. Okay. So there are quite a lot of things to unpack here. 
Gael Duez 12:49And just for clarification, the goal is to reduce the IT related emissions by 40 % or four zero within a year compared to the  SBTI target for the ICT sector, which is 45 % until end of 2030. So that's pretty ambitious. How did you manage to convince people to go for such an ambitious  target? And why this number? 
Anita Schüttler 13:17I didn't tell me this a few days ago. We were talking about, shouldn't it be 50 % just to make it even bigger? And when I first heard this, it was like, oh my God, so much 40%. That sounds like really a lot. And, um, I didn't said, yeah, I wanted to make it sound like a lot, but not that much. So it's less than half. And I thought this sounds good. So this is where the 40 % comes from. And  the idea is that in IT we have so much waste and everything is so wasteful. And if we just manage to turn off this waste, if it's 40 % in the end, no one knows.  Maybe  we actually do manage to reduce 40%. And if you see  how much, like for example, environments are running, even though they are not used, 40 % actually isn't that much of a big number anymore.  but yeah, we want some ambition because that's what I always think is a good thing about IT, reducing  emissions in IT, unless  unlike in physical environments where it really takes a lot of effort to even get a few percent in IT, you  unplug your servers or you do a deployment and the emissions are gone. And this is, this is so great. So I think we actually do have a common ground to be ambitious on.  
Gael Duez 15:05It makes sense to have aspirational goal. But in that case, I feel a bit of a contradiction  between we need to measure that we want to assess that people are shooting for big goals and the rule of thumb, because we all know that there are a lot of low hanging fruits, especially in companies where there is no green IT ambassador or sometimes even sustainable the ambassador.  But how do you manage to say it was pretty successful? What were your success criteria? Was it more like the number of companies or people joining or was it the actual results that you managed to get so far? 
Anita Schüttler 15:31Yeah, so maybe I mean, Aydin will be mad at me for telling this, but  we don't have hard numbers, but we have soft numbers from Karlsruhe  where they. Yeah,  back of the envelope calculations. If we turn this off and it takes this much and it runs for this long and we have the grid makes, example, how much will this be? yeah,  we're sometimes a little,  yeah, well, uncertain. Is this gonna work out really well? Because if you only take a look at this first step, having a few companies to start with and lowering some of what they do, it might actually not be that much overall at the end compared to like when you compete with say a factory that does cement or whatever,  we have no chance at all to make this happen. I think what our advantage is that  with such a program there will be a lot of training and we plant a seed here  for the next years to come and more and more people will really learn how to be a practitioner because that's what it takes to become a mentor at all. And then you have those people in the companies, they will  accelerate what's going on there and they will spread this whole thing to the next company and so on.
Gael Duez 17:09I understand now it's a learning by doing process  and that whenever the calculations are less and less back of the envelope and more more rooted in best practices, then of course  you will be backed by harder numbers.  But to be honest, the back of the envelope calculation that you already shared, mean, if you divide by two your number of servers and you know the energy consumption of the electricity consumption story of your server  and  somehow where they are located and the  carbon  emission factor of the electricity grid  in the region, it's a bit less than back of the envelope. Starts to be quite serious. So thanks for the clarification. And actually when we were chit chatting before hitting the record button, you mentioned that this project, the CO2 challenge that you want to bring at the European level was,  and I'm quoting you here, an emotional roller coaster. I think it's actually pretty cool if you can share what you meant by this, because when we consume non-profit projects or initiatives,  we don't necessarily see the amount of energy, sometimes money,  but also cognitive loads that are needed to kickstart them and even  more important to ramp them and to nurture them. So could you explain a bit more what you mean by this and  what do you expect to achieve also obviously with bringing it at the European level? 
Anita Schüttler 18:49Yeah, first of all, we are a pretty young association. We have pretty low member fees to make it possible for everyone to access this association unlike when you join a bigger association  and  money is very scarce. So  we're going for  an EU funding and we need a very high level of funding. So  there's programs on the EU level where you get like 60 % of your funding  and there's a lot of money, but when you have to provide those other 40 % yourself, you certainly might have a big problem if you don't have money flowing in from all sides, which we don't have. And currently there's still a program called Life, and this is the one that we're going for. The problem is this program was  built with the intention of accelerating the energy transition or rebuilding ecosystems. So lots of physical things and now we come with our IT stuff and we actually don't really fit into this program. But we still  want to get funding from this. So when you look for which program could be the right one for us, we always feel like we are sitting between two chairs because we don't really fit into this one, but we also don't really fit into that one. And  we have to make sure that we serve the criteria for this program to get funding at all, but still be true to what we want to achieve with this. So this is the first problem.  We get some  help from someone  who does this on a regular basis, EU fundings. And she's always very excited about what we want to try to achieve because it's something new and it will bring attention to this whole topic to the Brussels level, to the EU level because they don't really think of this decarbonizing IT thing at all right now. You can see this because there's no program for this, to fund this. Instead of like for AI. Just pick your program right now.  So she's very excited and we are near the hand are always very, Oh God, this is never going to happen because it doesn't fit and they won't fund us. And then we'll sit there and have no money at all. Maybe by the time this  podcast comes out, we'll have made it successfully. I hope so.  My present self will then be happy  for my future self. So we'll see.
Gael Duez 21:47I find it really interesting what you've just shared for two reasons.  There is this question of scaling and even for a nonprofit, like what you describe is basically investing for fundraising. And that's not really something that you think  that often when you launch an association. But when you want to have a larger impact, here comes a question of scaling and resources and just the time that people will put on the table is not necessarily enough. that's a twist of a mindset to say, okay, we're going to pay people to get more money, et cetera. And some people might feel uncomfortable with this. Like, isn't it getting too commercial or whatever? But on the other end, as you mentioned, if you really want to go beyond a few initiatives in Germany and go at the European level, then it makes sense to get resources. So yeah, thanks a lot for sharing. This feedback and this bit under the hood approach. Yeah. And the second point that struck me, but it's a bit like, you know, I'm rambling on this is my, what I call the green IT curse all the time, which is like IT is flagged as green by nature. And as you mentioned, AI is everywhere, et cetera.  we don't have any. 
Anita Schüttler 23:00 Electricity is a hundred percent renewable and we're done.  
Gael Duez 23:20 And we're done. Bravo. And the issue is, of course, that if I were the European Commission and I was checking which sector to decarbonize first, I mean, I could consider road transport as much as  the IT sector, because basically we emit as many greenhouses,  and this other sector.  But people will spontaneously think, oh, all these trucks, big polluting trucks, etc. We need to electrify them.  And no one will think about data centers or devices and so on. So it's really interesting that even to get funding to do  decarbonization of IT,  you don't fit anywhere. Yeah. 
Anita Schüttler 23:55We're accelerating so much and this IT sector will be a biggie in the future  and no one's thinking of this right now. \
Gael Duez 24:00I agree. I agree. The trend is really worrying.  speaking of it and maybe it's time to move to which is second part of our interview,  as I mentioned in the introduction. And what really interested me in the discussion we're having and we had to prepare the episode  is  this question of scaling. I mean, you're someone who tries to bring things at scale. And obviously you described it super well with  how from a small car's way based association you're trying to bring it to the European level. But it's also something that you did a lot in your work and you've got some good use cases to share about taking a good idea and making it at such a level that it starts to have a meaningful impact. I would love to get your feedbacks, get your insights from the trenches. 
Anita Schüttler 25:00So my company is  we build software for e-commerce. Yeah. And this in itself is I  actually want to call it a problem here because we've lost some  activist people over the years because they wanted to work on something that will provide the world with a better out view instead of  consumerism and more of this. But I love to stay because it means that I  get to work on where it's maybe needed most at least on  what I can choose, where I can choose to work. So  I've actually started out as a programmer in my company 15 years ago now.  And  like five years ago or so,  something happened. There were the  demos from Fridays for Future in Germany. They were really big back then.  We as a company were joining with a big group of people on a demo that was like 80,000 people or so, maybe 50,000, I don't know, a lot in any case. And there was so much momentum at that time, 2019, before the pandemic, that we said we want to do something in our work environment as well. we founded a guild internally at Newfoundland and we looked at our operations, what can we do better there? And back then, we already found that actually our biggest factor might be the software that we build and we have no means to find out how much that causes.  Some three years ago, I finally had my company where it needed to be for me to switch from being a programmer to being a full-time  sustainability practitioner. I had a lot to learn back then, but this is where it started. And later that year,  I found out about green coding and  found that this is actually where it all can come together for me. So what I bring as a programmer  and what I'm interested in as, yeah, a person,  a mom, yeah,  a citizen of this planet. And from there it all got going.  in the beginning, it was like,  I wanted my company to  help me push this topic. And they always said, Anita, you have to make it successful, then we'll back you up. And if no one's interested in this, then there will be no backup in the first place. So this is a bit, huh, what? But this is just how it happened.  actually, I got there. It just took me three years. So what we did in the beginning is that I worked with our teams.  We have  one or multiple teams for each customer  and we sneaked it all in. Yeah. We  looked at what are you doing there? And then like a one and a half years ago, I suddenly had the first of our customers and it's a big corporation. One that is on the stock market and they have over 300 IT people working for them all over  Europe, actually. And they  actually started out their green IT journey just with a small workshop. And they asked me, I was so happy, I can't tell you how happy I was. They asked me to get there and  have a workshop with them, talk about what is green software at all and what are the principles that you look into and so on. And then nothing happened again for a year.  early this year, they came back and they said, we have a big sustainability strategy for  our  whole corporation and  green IT is part of this. And we want to do role specific trainings  for all of our over 300 IT practitioners. And I was like, yes, yes, this is such an important step. Those last few weeks and months, I haven't had much free time to be honest, because  I was doing so many things in parallel. And  we had two  trainings of two hours each, just basic knowledge about sustainability, about negative impact of IT and so on. And then we had  training for  product management, product owners, project managers, UX and UI, like a real deep dive until no one was able to do anything anymore after four hours or so. And just recently we had another deep dive for web developers, backend developers, architects, operations, and so on. 
Gael Duez 30:15And this deep dive, when you mentioned web developer, backend developer, architects, they were all in the same room, this is  one single course or you split the deep dive into all their specialties? 
Anita Schüttler 30:31Yeah, so  what's important to know is that the teams that are working on their piece of software, they're always cross-functional teams. So you have everyone that is needed to make this piece of software happen in the same team. And at first I thought, I would be cooler to have them all split up and each of them gets their own training. But then I realized that it's actually pretty good if like, for example, the front end developers know about operations and architecture as well.  like the  product owners know about UX and so on. So they really can work together then. So this wasn't just me telling them stuff. I had a lot of practical exercises in this as well. So where they get to discuss and  work with a tool to really find out about this, yeah, sustainability in IT thing.  We took a look at a lot of  measurement tools and I had some exercises where they had to  use them themselves and find out how they work and how they can, for example, use EcoGrader and the web sustainability guidelines together to find out what to do and so on. 
Gael Duez 31:55So it means that you had doing this exercise, both a product manager, a UX, a web developer, etc.
Anita Schüttler 32:00Yeah, get them to work together. 
Gael Duez 32:09What struck me also is the time span. You're almost talking in years, not in weeks or months. It's, you know, I planted the seed and eventually one year later they came back to me and say, oh, we want to launch a full program, et cetera. So it's, it's really a, a work of patience, I would say. 
Anita Schüttler 32:30Absolutely. You need really, you need a long breath to get this done. Both me and my company, I'm really now seeing a lot of traction and a lot of support, but it took years to build and I think it's the same with customers. have a first  meeting of some sort, they get to know you, then nothing happens for months. At some point they will come back. Then you plant the next seed and then you wait for months or maybe even a year again until the next step happens. And in some ways this is good because the, for example, the measuring ecosystem has evolved a lot in that last year. Now I actually were able to show them, look, this is the green metrics tool. We've used it. This is what it looks like. This is how you do it.  So  I wouldn't have been able to do this a year ago. And the reason I was able to show them all of this is because we did it ourselves in our company. And that's a big thing for us as well.  
Gael Duez 33:37That's a big point. And that's definitely a topic that I would love to investigate with you. Just  one quick question. You mentioned green metrics tool.  Are there a specific set of tools that you use in your company?  Where does it come from?  
Anita Schüttler 34:00The green metrics tool is  a tool that was built by green coding solutions in Berlin.  Diddy,  shout out.  Yeah, they did a lot of really great tools. And by the way, the Bundesverband green software now has a landscape. Just like the CNCF, for example, they have a landscape as well. And we have a working group that worked at this landscape of measuring tools. can find it on landscape.bundesverbandgreensoftware.de.  Yeah. And it's a tool that you can use to measure  how much your software  uses in which  phase of the software life cycle. So looking  in from the outside.
Gael Duez 34:42Well, thanks a lot for the clarification.  now getting back to what you mentioned is that you practice it in your own company.  Can you provide us an example on how you deploy  green IT  measuring tools and how you make sure that  a piece of software or full software is actually getting assessed and how you reduce its environmental footprint? 
Anita Schüttler 35:06Yeah. So  this is, have to talk about two different things here. The first thing is that we always work for a customer and we work together with the customer. we usually also have people from the customer working with us together in the same team and all of the software that we build belongs to the customer. So this means that either the customers in the journey, they're on board or we… have very limited ability to do something. There's been  some sneaky stuff going on where we  had a team that did this together with the product owner from the customer and they  labeled their project cost reduction. So in Jira it said cost reduction  and  then we had our  green IT  tasks and every sprint we had one task that the team did  over time. It reduced some money as well, of course, but it was actually meant from a different perspective. If the customer is not actively asking for this, we have to be sneaky about it. 
Gael Duez 36:20Was the fact that  you planted the seeds and went almost undercover using the word cost reduction where actually you were looking for carbon reduction,  was it  useful? to get  broader adoption? Yeah, okay. 
Anita Schüttler 36:40Yes.  And actually,  the stuff that we did in this project, it was so cool. And I talked about it at conferences as well. Because for example, this team,  when we talked beforehand, they were very certain that this service,  uses 80 % of our,  causes 80 % of our cost. This will be the service where we have to start. And then we started measuring and found out that no, not at all. This service has like 7 % or so of your emissions, but this other service that costs you, I don't know, five or 6%, it causes over 50 % of this team's emissions. This was really an eye-opener for me to find out. And then we tweaked their servers. We played around with the setup of service that they had and how many instances where and so on and were able to get  the emissions of this setup down to like four or 5%. So basically reducing almost half of the emissions that this team caused in their operations. Yesterday we had our internal conference again and  in last year's conference I talked about this and everyone's really interested in,  how does this work? What do we have to do to get it done? Yeah, so you always learn from whatever you do. And then you talk about it and others will start  being interested and asking the right questions. That's really cool. 
Gael Duez 38:15That's cool. And it creates inspiration.  And you were mentioning that you needed to mention two things. The first one is that you work always with a customer, otherwise you don't have that much impact. And I get the second thing about the feedback you wanted to provide about using the tools internally was...
Anita Schüttler 38:33So  this year, we actually now have a software that belongs to Neuland. So we have full impact of this.  It's a search software called Homes. It builds on open source software like Solar, OpenSearch, and so on.  But now we were able to do whatever we wanted with this. And  we used this ability to do whatever we wanted to say, we want to have a Blue Angel certification for the software and be one of the first companies at all to get a Blue Angel for their software.  So the Blue Angel is an environmental certification that you can get for all kinds of stuff. And it's published by the German Environmental Agency together with the Ministry for Yeah, environmental ministry or so. And you can get this for like, it's known for paper, for example, toilet paper, whatever. I've seen it on  a ship as well, which was  very weird. You can get it for data centers. And  a few years ago,  there was also a version for software that only had one company getting certified. And that was the Ocula by KDE. And that was it because the  requirements were so high that it was not practical at all. And then it was reworked a few years ago, like two years ago or so. Now we have two  software that have this Blue Angel after what was reworked. The first is the Green Metrics tool,  which it already talked about.  And  the second is Nextcloud,  which is really nice as well. But  all these software that were certified so far, they were open source. And now we came with our almost but not completely open source tool and  we started late April.  when we did,  asked Arne, who's our measuring partner,  we measure everything on his cluster, and Philippe, who's  in the Bundesverband together with me active and he's like I am an auditor, he's audited all the other softwares that got the Blue Angels so far.  And I asked them,  we want to be done by the end of May. This should be no problem at all.  it? And they were kind of,  let's see. And  I was pretty naive in the beginning.  And then it took us like until the end of May and even still, we're still not done. I can say that the green metrics tool evolved a bit as well in this process and we all learned a lot and it's just important for someone. Someone has to do this. 
Gael Duez 41:47How come that it took so much time? 
Anita Schüttler 41:39Yeah. So,  first of all, the software wasn't done yet.  It still isn't.  I'm someone who always goes,  I always go to my colleagues.  We have to be fast. Come on, let's do this. And the software was still changing while we were already measuring. And the team was working on the software and I did this certification process together with a colleague  of mine,  Tilo,  and we had no idea about how the software is working. So we had to  learn how is it working under the hood.  And the thing about the Blue Angel is that  you can see  it was written with a different kind of software in mind. It was written with,  we have this installer, you click on it, it installs everything, and then we have to make sure that it's good and it doesn't do anything crazy. And now we come,  so Nyland is not a product company. Yeah, we're  a company building software all the time, but we don't usually build products. And  Holmes is not a product as well an accelerator. we had to,  we have like five Docker containers that we had to orchestrate one after the other. They need to wait for each other.  We need product data that has to be imported and only when it's, when this product data is there, we can go on and so on. So this process was pretty difficult already. And  then we did the measurements and found out that, so the Blue Angel asks you to have a standard deviation of not more than 5 % over like 10 or 30 measuring runs. And we had like seven, eight, 9 % standard deviation. So what is happening there? And yeah, until we tackled this, so we found out we need more memory for solar and so on. So until you're done here. And then we thought we were done, but we had to redo all of our measuring  because we had to split up our scenarios. So you need usage scenarios. We have one  for a back office where someone is configuring something. And then we have a usage scenario that  imitates the real  online shop that will search something. And this  scenario of Yeah, it's basically J-Meter doing this. No one had this before. We had to split up those because they were together and so on. So lots of problems where all of us learned, not just us at Neuland, but also  Anne  and Philipp, they were learning and yeah, the tool evolved over time. And I think we've  taken quite a few hurdles in the process and I hope that by next week we will actually really be done with this. 
Gael Duez 45:00Okay, excellent. And if someone were to ask you, how do I scale green software  practices in my own company? What will be the top advices, top tips that  you would tell him or her? 
Anita Schüttler 45:10Top tip number one. Be as close to what the people in your company are actually doing as you can. Don't  come with green  software principles on a high level because  they  will not have an impact in the daily work. look at what people are doing, translate for them, and then ask them to do this or that, which you know will really have an impact. Second is  depending on what company you're in, it might actually be a good thing not to talk about sustainability. know this sounds really crazy, but I've had so many conversations where people said, oh, this is cool. We already thought about doing this. Oh, we are actually already doing this, but not for sustainability reasons, but for reasons X, Y, Z. So Green Software provides so much value on so many levels that people often don't even realize that you're doing something for the environment here because it also  adds so much value for other things that a company is after. 
Gael Duez 46:25I can feel that. I was about  to add,  yeah, be prepared to be patient. That's a  long game. Thanks a lot, Anita. That was a lot that was shared for a single podcast episode. So I wish you the very best with your… CO2 challenge and the ramping up, I would say, of the Bundesvenband Green Software. Yeah, thank you. And also that all the efforts that you've put into your company and your clients will actually keep on  spreading. So thanks a lot for joining the show. Thanks a lot for having me. was great to be here.  
Gael Duez 47:00Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode 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. If you enjoyed this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Each vote is worth a thousand likes on YouTube. Talking about social media, sharing this episode on your favorite one, or directly with relatives working as a software practitioner seems also a good idea to provide them with inspiration to go beyond raising awareness and scale green software engineering. You got the point. Being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more listeners. 
We are now going to do a summer break or winter break, actually, for me. And Green IO will be back on Tuesday, August 19th. Who will be the guest? I don't know yet. I have a couple of interviews to edit and I'm not sure which one will come first. Make sure to subscribe to email alerts or notifications on your favorite podcast platform  not to miss it. 
By the way, 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. As you guessed from this episode, Green IO Munich had a great first edition last week  and of course,  all eyes are now on Green IO Llondon on September  23rd and 24th. As  a Green IO listener,  you know the drill,  you can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP.  Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference  are all gone.  I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you fellow responsible technologists  build  a greener digital world.
Roxanne 49:08 one byte at a time

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“Climate activist in a suit”. 
This is how Rainer Karcher describes himself. 
It is an endless debate between people advocating for the system to change from the outside and those willing to change it from the inside. In this episode Gaël Duez welcomes a strong advocate of moving the corporate world into the right direction from within? Having spent 2 decades in companies such as Siemens or Allianz, Rainer Karsher knows the corporate world well, which he now advises on sustainability. 

In this Green IO episode, they analyse the current backlash against ESG in our corporate world and what can be done to keep big companies aligned with the Paris agreement, but also caring about biodiversity or human rights across their supply chain. Many topics were covered such as: 

• Why ESG has nothing to with “saving the planet”
• 3 tips to tackle the end of the month vs end-of-the world dilemma
• Embracing a global perspective on ESG and why the current backlash is a western world only issue 
• Knowing the price we pay for AI and how to avoid rebound effect
• The challenge with shadow AI and why training is pivotal

And yes they talked about whales also and many more things!
BTW, Rainer will also be one of our 2 keynote speakers at Green IO Munich next week where he will wrap-up the day after having represented SustainableIT.org on the NGO panel as their CSO. 
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Learn more about our guest and connect: 

• Rainer’s LinkedIn
• Green IO website 
• Green IO Slack
• Gaël Duez's website 
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Rainer’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode

• Green investment needs in the EU and their funding
• EU Omnibus package 
• EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)
• China’s new CSDS standards: Far-reaching requirements in sustainability reporting
• China introduces basic standards for corporate sustainability disclosures
• SustainableIT.org 
• Green IO episode with Laetitia Bornes part 1 and part 2
• heartprint.eu
• heartandzukunft.eu
• sustainableit.org

Transcript (auto-generated)Gaël Duez (00:00)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 bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.
Gaël Duez (00:27)Climate Activist in a Suit When I first read this statement from Rainer Karcher, it immediately resonated with me. How can we move our corporate world into the right direction from within? It is an endless debate between people advocating for the system to change from the outside and those willing to change it from the inside. And today I'm welcoming a strong advocate of the second option. Rainer knows this world well, having spent two decades in companies such as Siemens or Allianz. He founded Heartprint a year ago to keep on advising them on sustainability. Today, we will try to analyse the current backlash against ESG in our corporate world and what can be done to keep big companies aligned with the Paris Agreement but also caring about the biodiversity crisis or the human rights across the supply chain. By the way, Rainer will also be one of our two keynote speakers at Green IO Munich on July 2nd and 3rd, where he will wrap up the day after having represented SustainableIT.org on the NGO panel as their chief sustainability officer.
Gael Duez (01:40)Welcome, Rainer. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (01:44)Thank you very much for having me and thank you very much for the very good introduction. I'm really looking forward, first of all, to meeting all of you, hopefully, who are listening now, and to meet you, Gail, in Munich on July 3rd, which is Munich, which is my hometown. So I'm really happy to be part of that and just looking forward to seeing you all.
Gael Duez (02:01)Yeah, thanks a lot for this and you have a lot of pressure on your shoulders. I know that because you're playing home. So we expect a lot from you.
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (02:08)And you can, you can. I'm not sure whether I'm able to fulfill, but I'm very much looking forward to at least giving a bit of thoughts and sharing my mind.
Gael Duez (02:13)I'm sure you will. Thanks a lot for this. And you know, when we were discussing how ESG is delayed from most agendas due to according business priorities in the current times, you were actually very vocal about the lack of business acumen of decision makers doing so. Because according to you in particular in such times, ESG remain a major business goal and executive committees or board should not, and I'm quoting you here, deprioritize future readiness. So there's so much to unpack with this stance of yours, but maybe you could start with explaining what you meant by… and deprioritizing future readiness.
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (02:58)Absolutely with pleasure and thanks for that question. Well, let me just maybe circle back a little bit. And as I've started my combination of IT where my foundation lies, so I'm an informatic person since 1997. So my career started in IT and kept it that way for quite a long time, exactly as I said, more than two decades. And about five years ago, I've started to get into sustainability from a business perspective and combine my private passion for environmental protection and for certain other things with job and with IT. But at that time, there was a very strong focus mostly brought up from Fridays for Future and all the for future type of combinations. And the society, I think, got very much more interested in talking about the topic, which was a good one. And then from my perspective, things happened. It just turned into something which nowadays is called the green left wing woke type of a thing. And once you start using ESG or sustainability as a term, people are, or least the majority of people are like, ⁓ gosh, come on, again that thing and again that talk. In particular, if you go to businesses and if you go to the C suites of companies. And the thing is, ESG was never meant to be a left green, woke type of a thing. It is just something for ensuring the foundation of our future. And if we're talking about future readiness, from a personal perspective, from a company's perspective, from business and from survival, than it is about just being aware of what's going to happen, create transparency of what to expect and have a bit of an ability to predict what you can do and how you can influence things. What I mean on that, bringing that down to ground level is if you own a company, if I just got handed over a company maybe from the fifth or sixth generation back something which was founded 100 years ago. The only thing I'm very much interested in is keeping my business going. And whatever it takes, I need to be ensured that the future and whatever is happening there is something I'm able to either influence or to predict to be able to adopt it. And that means that if, for example, there is someone crazy coming up in the US and raising taxes to 50%, I should be aware of how much influence this will have to my income. If I do have a lot of business which has been made with the US, I should be aware. And I should have a plan B, some kind of a backup plan if things are going to happen, what they're happening. And the same is relevant for anything which could come up from the environment. If there is a hailstorm showing up in three days, if I am a car dealer and I do have 1,000 of cars parked outside, I should be aware of that. And I should have an ability to maybe bring them to a parking garage or elsewhere. If I do have maybe agricultural business ⁓ I'm going to take, I should be aware. If there is a very dry summer to be expected and maybe set up something which is helping to water my plants. Otherwise, I most likely have an issue from a business perspective. So nothing of that has to do with saving the planet or just doing some kind of good stuff and saving animals or insects or anything. No, it has not. It's a very purely business perspective in ensuring that my business is able to keep going.
Gael Duez (06:10)And how do you differentiate in that case ESG from, I would say, risk management that every good company should have put in place?
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (06:22)That's the fun thing. There is not that much of a differentiation and there doesn't have to be. So resilience and risk management is something which, at least in exactly the way like you said it, I did work for Allianz, which is an insurance company. So they are very much interested in all that aspect. So resilience plays a crucial role for them. So take their business perspectives, which is indeed just in trying to regulate as little as possible as damages and just selling policies and polices or insurances as much as possible as well. So the business model is at risk if things turn around the other way. So if they have to regulate a lot of damages caused by strong weather results, for example, take the latest example of Switzerland where there was hundreds of households just pushed away from a glacier which just broke. If you are the insurance company and you have to regulate that. This makes you multi-million or even billion worth. Take the example of wildfires which took place in the US, in Los Angeles, same thing there. So if you're an insurer, you have to be aware of the risks which could occur and just then make your business based on that. And that awareness, that risk awareness is exactly what we're talking here as well. So future readiness comes very much with exactly this. But that was the example of an insurance company. If I'm a local small medium-sized company, producing anything for maybe the big enterprises. Those companies normally do not have a view into this. There might be some little, yeah, different sessions depending on what kind of business you do, but most of the small medium-sized companies don't even have a division looking into risks or analyzing them. And that's exactly where Future Readiness comes in from my perspective with very small, very concrete examples, not with 120 PowerPoint slide type of strategy paper, which you need to read through and then still nothing changes. No, tangible results, tangible and grabbable examples of how to make yourself aware of what to expect. And maybe another example, even if I'm a small company and I am the ones maybe producing some electronic components for big suppliers, I do have maybe dependencies from Asia, from electronic goods which are being produced there. So supply chain risks a core. And that is something which to me is a perfect example of the classical ESG. So I have environmental risks, have social aspects like human rights, I'm doing the production cycle, modern slavery and all that things. And I have governance structured things which are, for example, regulations like carbon board adjustment mechanisms. So the term ESG itself, sustainability as a term, might be in a wrong angle in the meantime and being wiped off the agendas. But you change the narrative and if you just change the perspective towards something which is be aware of what to expect and try to find a backdoor plan, try to find something which can help you with diversifying maybe your supply chains. Then we are talking about future readiness from a pure business perspective, nothing to do with saving the planet or doing something for anyone from the green party.
Gael Duez (09:19)I fully got it and it brings a question in my head because quite often it seems to be for medium sized business, even for big corporation, very strong tension between what should be done to be future ready, but in a matter of years and what must be done to be financial ready for the next quarter report for instance or even just to meet the end of the year from a financial perspective. And this tension I've met it quite a lot with people saying yeah I know that at some point my factory might get into trouble because we might not access water in such a cheap and easy way that it used to be the case before. Yet we know about this supply chain issue and like 90 % of our suppliers are based in Asia. But under the current economical circumstances, we cannot do anything else. How do you answer this sort of not necessarily even a pushback, but just question arising from your clients?
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (10:23)Yeah, yeah. Well, there is two angles which I always try to come up with. So the first one is depending on the size of your company, you depend on loans from banking and financial industries. So if you invest into new machines, if you have a big project coming up, you need to have a cheap and a very good and affordable loan from banking industries. And I just yesterday read an article that the biggest investment bank from the Nordics plus the European Central Bank already reacted to omnibus. So the current deregulation ideas from the European Commission, so to say, and just simply decline. And they just simply said, well, you can either go ahead with CSRD and with the reporting like it was supposed to be and like it was originally, or you can just count on it that depending on your interest as a company, loans are getting more and more expensive, or you won't even get one. So this is the first reaction I would have. Just simply think about that. If you have even a short-term type of a planning, if you only have a six-month or a one-year perspective ⁓ to look into the future, you still are in trouble if you completely ignore that topic, if you try to avoid thinking of it just based on, well, the European Commission decided to just push it up for another two years. Well, the banking industry does not. They are very much interested in already understanding how future-ready your company is of today.
Gael Duez (11:41)But it's funny that you're mentioning the banking industry because you know there is a famous hearsay that there is no climate deniers among insurers because the insurance world is perfectly aware of the devastating effects of climate change. But the financial sector and especially the banking sectors comes under much more pressure usually because they still finance fossil fuel expansion plan and the like, and they're not really super clear on how to finance the ecological transition. So it's kind of a surprising example that you provide. And if you could elaborate a bit on it, like, do you really believe that the banking sector is actually now pushing more and more for sustainable practices? I'm really curious about it.
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (12:31)So I'm mixing emotions to be honest. I do know a lot of people out of that bubble and in particular within due to my time in Allianz in the financial sector. So I do know a couple of people even in the largest banks of the world. And yes, for sure, there is a lot of praying water and drinking wine. There is a lot of, yeah, let's just do this and that. And you need to invest into sustainable futures and still. those banks are the ones which are investing the most still in oil and gas, which is our enemy. So therefore, let's be clear on that. But on the other side, from a pure business perspective to those banks, I know from those people that the risk analyzes ⁓ for all of them. And independently, whether they invest a lot or just very little or nothing into oil and gas, all of their risk assessments came up quite clearly. If they put millions into any kind of companies and invest into any kind of companies without a clear strategy, the risk is way too high that they never see that money again. And from that perspective, they will have to change and they will change. Is that something which can happen like a finger flip? It can't. So this is something which takes time. And that's another thing which I've very much learned during the last six, seven years now in the big corporates. If you believe that a 300,000, 500,000 people company is able to be changed within half a year or a year, it can't be. Even if it has to. And even if, yes, for sure, the pressure is incredibly high. This is where, and probably already can now listen to the climate activist and the suit. So this is that mixed and emotion type of a thing, which I'm struggling with each day and trying to find that balance and transport that into a narrative, which has been understood then from the C-level back to your first question, because yes, I know, and I'm the activist here, the windows and the opportunities are closing rapidly fast. And I just listened to Johann Rockström last week in Berlin, who just showed up the graphs of what to expect and that the two degrees won't be something we can expect in 2040 or 2050, no, already by 2030. So it's incredibly increasing at the moment and the rise of the temperature and the loss of species in biodiversity aspects, all of that is dramatically increasing and we should and we have to act the fastest as we can. But on the other side, we lost that opportunity already 15 or 20 years ago. So this is something I could get depressive now and looking back in anger and say, well, we should have, but no, this is not me. So the optimistic person in me as well. Let's do whatever we are able to and let's push it as hard as we can, but still keeping it realistic. circling back to your original question, the second point on that is, well, if I do have a company which completely ignored the aspect of sustainability so far, I always come up with the argumentation, well, then let's start with things where you're even able to save money. So the return on invest is immediately there if you, for example, look into energy efficiency. 90 % of small medium-sized companies never ever looked into an energy efficiency aspect with automation. This is where then the digital comes up and my twin transformation heart beats a bit louder. There is so much opportunities today where you are not even able react manually anymore and you don't have to, but just implement very easy, easy to consume, very affordable solutions to increase energy efficiency. Save energy and so therefore save money as well and get the return on investment quite rapidly. So and this is where you can have a starting point with and based on that define a strategy and a vision for your company and what most people in particular the C level is underestimating is of how many people within the company are already interested in supporting that ideas. So majority of small medium-sized companies I've spoken to in the last 12 months was at the beginning like yeah well you know. This is not a topic for us and nobody speaks about sustainability as a whole. And there is no clear vision and strategy. And I doubt that we just get the approvals from the employees and from operational roles. And they have been all wrong. 80 % of human beings, and that's the average value, are quite well aware of what's going to happen. And 80 % would like to change and take some kind of an influence, but they don't because they don't have the ability to in their day-to-day jobs. If you just grant them a vision and an idea and a strategy and some kind of support, you would wonder as a small medium-sized company of how much is possible to be changed in a very short period of time with all the knowledge, the experience of your employees, of the people surrounding you.
Gael Duez (16:55)So actually, it's not two points, it's three aspects. The first one being get good financing conditions by being sustainability compliant. The second one is go for savings and cost savings equals energy savings and actually reducing waste most of the time comes with some sort of a cost savings. And the third one is actually please your employees and your stakeholders and your shareholders, maybe, but at least your stakeholders because most of them are more climate aware than you might think so. So that will be your answer to this usual pushback end of the world, end of the months. And Rainer, you mentioned the omnibus law, so maybe for the listeners, and there are many of them not based in Europe, if you could just clarify what it is. But also it helped me ask actually you another question, which is actually a double question. So it's three questions in one, I think I think you're having a hard time with me. I'm sorry with this.
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (17:46)I'm enjoying it lot. I hope that keeps it interesting for the listeners. That's the only thing we would like to get.
Gael Duez (17:56)Excellent. If you can just briefly explain what is the omnibus situation and how you connect it with the current backlash against sustainability that we see in Europe and in the US, and maybe also because you're a very global person, well connected around the world, how much of the current narrative that we have in the ESG circles or sustainability circles at large is actually a western bias because as far as I'm checking on the news around the world there are a lot of other countries still implementing ESG regulations. seems it's always a bit difficult to assess what is going on in China especially when like me you don't speak Chinese and you don't know the culture that well but it seems that for instance China is pushing a very ambitious agenda on ESG regulation. They're actually quite aware of the biodiversity crisis. It doesn't mean that they're doing everything to solve it, yeah, how much we are just convincing ourselves that the world is now facing a backlash where it's actually Trump and its European followers that are actually doing this backlash. So it's a lot of questions and you can feel free to unpack them the way you want
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (19:08)I like the global perspective. And exactly as I said, I'm working globally since a long, long, long time. So that I did spend most of my career in global faced companies. mostly had colleagues from all over the world and influenced them from different cultures and from different type of thought and mindset, which I always really
Gael Duez (19:13)Yeah, yeah.
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (19:26)let's just maybe start unrolling the questions and getting a bit of explanation. So the omnibus is something which came up now, in particular due to the economical crisis which we are facing all over Europe based on the new US administration and all the tariffs and taxes and all the things which he came up with. ⁓ And I'm not further commenting on because otherwise I could get immediately very angry. But let's just stick it with that. Since he's in place, the European Union tried to find ways to support European economies and lower bureaucracy and lower the effort which has to be taken, for example, for non-financial reporting. So it is a quite already established type of a thing to… put yourself into non-financial reporting. It's nothing of just now a year or two. This has been in place since quite a long time for big corporates. So a lot of companies with more than 1,000 employees and 50 million on the revenue do have to report that since already 15 years or even longer. So it just got replaced then by the so-called CSRD, which is the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Within that, was, or there are, ESRS, so that's the reporting standards for environmental, social and governmental structures. And that exactly was meant for the next three years to bring it further down to reporting even to companies above 250 employees. So not the smallest ones, not the hidden champions, but companies with 250 employees and more would have been required to report. Omnibus now with the idea to reduce bureaucracy, to make it a bit easier for the small companies was brought in place to just limit to 250 employees company, but to raise that to a 1000 people company. So there was a couple of millions which would not or which are not affected due to that any longer. And it was then pushed by another two years. So not with implementing it by 2025, but 2027, 2028. And this is exactly where the criticism comes from, from my point of view, that with omnibus, things are being delayed at a time where they should not be delayed. Future readiness, as we spoke about already, is being even de-prioritizing companies are not looking into it. Because this is a bit of the typical carrot and stick situation. If you're not enforced in doing, you don't. At least that's the majority of companies who are looking into that. If there is no law in place, which pushes me to do something, then I just simply don't do it. And that's exactly where I think we need to change the perspective and need to come into another angle. And that is which most likely didn't even make it into the news. There is, with coming with Omnibus, so that was a bit of the good part of it, a voluntary type of a reporting. So that's the voluntary standards, which is then meant to support the small companies with creating a very simple and very much slower and smaller type of a reporting to standardize that. So if you're working with a big enterprise, if you are a supplier for a big enterprise, you mostly get sustainability questions anyhow day by day on your table. If you're in tenders, if you try to work together with others, you need to report on sustainability. And the voluntary standards was meant or is meant standardize that, that you don't have to reply to each of your customers in a different way would like to have it in an Excel sheet. The other one as a PDF, the third one as an email. The fourth one would like to have maybe access to your database with an API. So to standardize that, ⁓ Omnibus came up with the voluntary standards. And this is something which I think makes total sense. And in exactly that way, I think if you look at it and keep the standards, keep the reporting for the big corporates where there is a lot of things already in place and a lot of reporting already has been happening for the last two years or at least one year and keep that and bring it more to a standardized way for the small companies. So this would be a bit of the explanation what the omnibus is all about. To your second question, I 100 % agree. We are looking very much on the depriorization and on everything is getting worse and worse over time now from the industrialized Western world. If you go to other parts of the world, if you go to developing countries, if you go to sub-Saharan Africa, they have a complete different view and a complete different perspective on sustainability as a whole. And why? Because they're under pressure much more than whatever we are already. If you go to India, for example, in my former surrounding in Allianz, I had a huge amount of colleagues working in India. So 6,500 of Allianz technology employees are working in Trivandrum in the most south of India and in Pune, which is more in the north. What I found and still find is a lot of passion, a lot of engagement of the people there to really make things happening because they were affected much more than whatever we are. ⁓ And not only from a climate perspective, not only from rising temperatures and the loss of water and strong weather results, but plastic pollution, as an example, if you take plastic pollution, well, we do have a very good recycling system. So what you couldn't see now is that I just ⁓ questioned whether it is a good recycling system.
I'm I just did see a reporting which was science based just two days ago, which was just showing up the recycling quotes in Europe, which are less than 12%. So we are reducing the recycling to a very little minimum and only PET has been recycled. All the rest as it's mostly combinations is not. So if you think we're good in that, we are not. It's just been mostly sold or burned or just dumped somewhere, we just don't see it. And that's a bit of the difference of what it is in India. But back to the question, you said it as well. China, for example, took over a third of the European CSRD. Well, a bit of an adopted wording and somehow a little bit of a different angle. But a third of the regulatories which we came up with for the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which is now being pushed away through omnibus, has been taken over from the Chinese government and brought into local laws. And well, I'm not putting, and don't get me wrong now, I'm not putting an autocraty and a society which is ⁓ putting pressure on human rights from every angle and ignoring human rights from a democratic perspective like what we are looking into. I'm not putting that into a positive view, but exactly as you said it. So the depriorization of sustainability and ESG is not at all happening all across the world, It might come up from a different interest. And if you take China, for example, which is the country with the biggest increase of solar and PVs over the last two years, that comes for sure not from a ecological reason, but a pure economical one, because solar is in the meantime, the cheapest way of producing power to the grid as you can get it. And this is exactly the reason why they do it. So there is definitely different type of interests. But on the other side, Like you said, those who are affected, those who are feeling pressure, either on waste or on temperature or a lack of water or lack of biodiversity, if you have to start pollinating plants manually by hand, if you have to have people climbing up trees, pollinating apples and oranges to get the fruit at the end, because there is literally no bees left, no insects left to pollinate in other ways. Then you start thinking and this is exactly what we are still missing and already not given an answer why I think it is what it is. I think we are still way too protected in the Western industrialized world. Still everything is in supermarkets, still everything is somehow affordable, still everything is existing. If I open the tap, there is still fresh and clear water I'm able to drink right out of tap, at least in the majority of Europe. And that is something which I think is a bit of just pushing away the realities of what the world as a whole looks like and the global issues are.
Gael Duez (27:28)That's funny, it is exactly the word that popped in my head when you were discussing and explaining the global situation that we are still so protected. protected or putting very nicely things under the carpet, as you mentioned for the plastic recycling or downcycling. By downcycling, mean that you use the product to build something with a less quality, so for instance, plastic bottles, they will never be used to make other plastic bottles as the little recycling sign could wrongly advertise us, but more to create carpet or garments or whatever. And I think this would be much more understandable for the the general public, if we were talking about downcycling rather than recycling. But this is a green IT or digital sustainability podcast. And I'd like maybe to zoom in a bit and ask you, how shall tech companies navigate these troubled times and embrace the paradigm that you've just described, starting with future proof. No Sorry. Starting with future readiness.
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (28:36)And future proof is a good one as well, so we can talk about it in both ways. So that's totally fine. So try to visualize a butterfly. A butterfly is only able to fly if both wings are moving. And if there is only one wing, it will immediately drop off. And that's exactly what I try to explain what twin transformation stands for. It's the transformation of, and that's the one wing digital, and make digital sustainable. So looking into your own footprint into the things which are just coming up due to technology. So that's a major energy consumption. Take AI, which just now skyrocketed the energy consumption of data centers all across the world and still keeps going. So I think we are already at 3 % of the world's energy, which is consumed by data centers purely, just data centers. So not everything else for infrastructure, networks, Wi-Fi, whatever type of things, no purely data centers. And this is going to be predicted to go up to maybe even 22 to 30 percent in the next years due to AI because of a massive energy hunger which comes up on that. Same is relevant for water consumption. So all those data centers need to have cooling independent whether they use direct cooling, which is mostly a closed circle or and this is the majority of data centers use cooling on the roofs with chillers, whether it's just water chilled and used for such kind of cooling just have a massive consumption of fresh water. And this is something which we still don't have an answer for. And well, this is the own footprint. If you take materials, if you take the amount of equipment which is being dumped each day instead of circular usage and instead of refurbing the company devices and just handing it to a second life or just ensuring that materials like raw materials ⁓ is being just reused again. of that is the outcome and the own footprint of digital. And that needs to be turned into a sustainable aspect. So you need to be transparent. You need to know how to treat things and sustainability needs to take an influence into that one wing. The other wing is the sustainability transformation or the future readiness transformation. And all of that to get support from digital. What I've experienced in most of the corporates in the past and still, if I look into companies nowadays, there is a lot of manual effort if it comes, for example, to the reporting aspect. what we've spoken about a bit earlier, CSRD and all the non-financial reporting, most of the companies, and I hope that you agree in listening now, still have Excel and SharePoint and PowerPoint and emails and PDFs and whatever type of things as a source and data tool to work with for such kind of reporting. Does it have to be that way? No. There is definitely digital answers. Is AI supported answers, there's a lot of things in automation you can just achieve in supporting your surrounding and your work. And thing is, those people who I met who are in sustainability manager roles, in sustainability head roles, chief sustainability officers, majority of them is non-IT people. So they do not have even an idea how to make things different than with Excel or with PowerPoint or anything else. So what it needs is digital and IT people need to support those people because none of them is in such kind of a sustainability position to just do non-financial reporting. None of them is interested in day by day shuffling Excel sheets and counting numbers. All of them would like to take influence and make things happen within the company surrounding and I am able to support them with digital. We are able, for example, in product cycles. So taking another example, Green Digital Twins, this is a very perfect version. If you create a digital copy, a twin, of your product, of whatever type of material type of thing you're working with in a company and just color it a bit green in remark of looking ⁓ into maybe the weight. If you reduce weight, do a digital twin without even producing something, you can maybe lower weight for a transport of a good. If you repairability already upfront, you can support the longevity of a product. If you just have an awareness, of which components are being used in a final product, you're even able to already predict the recyclability of that product. All of that are definitely a lot of things where digital can support sustainability and the other way around, where sustainability needs to have a closer look into the digital world and ensuring that digital is not increasing the issues and the problems, but helping them and supporting.
Gael Duez (33:09)You know, a few weeks ago, had a Letitia Bornes, a researcher on digital sustainability and one of the good experts of rebound effect. And when I was listening to you after having listened to her, I'm sort of having mixed feelings about it because, I mean, on paper, what you describe is flawless. I mean, and I love the butterfly example, by the way. But what has been happening over time is that every time digital enhance or improved processes, reduced waste, reduced energy consumption and so on, some sort of rebound effects happen, which most of the time cancel out the gains. And this is always where I'm a bit cautious. Like I would love to deploy what you're describing, like a word where IT and AI and so on would purely focus on reducing creating a more livable planet But this is not what has happened most of the time. It's a nuanced world and I don't want to be oversimplifying here. How do you deal with it? How do you create the conditions where what you describe will actually happen rather than having this crazy rebound effect like, it's more efficient by 50%. So let's spend 70 % more on it to gain new customers markets. 
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (34:34)And that's a very concrete danger I do see as well. That's without any doubt. And the more efficient we will get, let's now follow maybe the predictions of the big corporates, the tech giants from the US who are currently now predicting that AI will solve most of the issues. AI will increase the technology which is being required for carbon capture and storage. AI will help us for fusion reactor development and all that things. So they make us feel that
Gael Duez (34:44)Thank you.
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (35:00)AI and digital will solve all the world's issues and we can just lean back and keep going than what we've done already the last 100 years. And this is the complete opposite of what it should be. And I agree with you. So there is definitely a huge risk that there is rebound effects in certain other areas. And that's even more showing the importance of people like us who are aware. And it's all with awareness. It all comes with transparency and with understanding what the outcome is and that we always pay a price.
Gael Duez (35:05)Yeah.
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (35:29)I think, and now let's just maybe circle into a bit of another angle. So far, we've kept it mostly in the environmental and technological aspects. maybe a bit increase the focus on the social component and meaning on us, human beings. If you take the amount of people with mental health issues and depression at the moment, which is massively increasing, mostly due to the pressure which we face, mostly due to all that always on things with social media. And if you just take all of that, think people are getting more and more aware, well, there might be an outcome with what I do each day and there might be a price I have to pay for. And that's exactly what we need to be aware of. If we use digital, if we use AI, if we use technology, it is not what the ones producing it and making the most money and billions out of that is trying to sell us. It comes with a price. That price is something which we have to bring up even more on the agendas and why it needs to have collaboration, why it needs to have NGOs. Even if in the US, for example, NGOs are not that famous anymore and Trump is wiping off kind of financial support for them, we need them. We need to have people who are independent, who are not money driven, but who are driven from values, from common good, which are interested in changing the world. Are they the ones to answer all of the world's questions? No, they are not. It's a balance between. And that brings me back to my own personal brand, to that climate activist in a suit idea. It needs to have a balance between both worlds. And that comes again, repeating that with the awareness of what is the price and what is the outcome we can get and finding a right balance in reducing the risk of any kind of bouncing back into then doing even more and even doubling than maybe the outcome.
Gael Duez (37:12)And that's absolutely right. And you mentioned two things that actually would like to get a bit of a highlight from you, which is the price we pay for AI. And I think the example you took was excellent. And you mentioned the NGO and I briefly mentioned in the introduction that you're the chief sustainability officer of sustainableit.org. So for those who are not familiar with sustainableit.org, I would say that this is an NGO who focuses mostly on IT executives such as CIO and CTO How do you help them with your CSO hat future readiness and also to push back this AI frenzy with this sort of fear of missing out the syndrome that we are facing to take a balanced decision.
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (38:01)Yeah, thank you very much for that question. So maybe for those not knowing me, I'm working full time in my own company for Heartprint which is my paid job, my day to day job, which is paying the soup on the table for my three kids and for my wife and the family at home here. And then they do have ⁓ a side job, is pro bono for sustainableit.org. Sustainableit.org, exactly as I explained it, was found about three years ago in the US. It's a classical NGO, no commercial interest, no financial interest. The only thing we get financially is the fees from the members, which are in the meantime 135, mostly exactly as I said, big stock listed companies from all across the world. And what the initial idea in nutshell was all about is in defining standards and in just joining a group of people who are interested in doing the same and speaking up with one voice towards those who are trying to fool us. So that was a bit of the initial idea, because if you started ⁓ five years ago, in requesting maybe carbon footprint from hyperscalers, you got either no answer or completely hidden type of an answer without any value. And that was something which started the idea in defining sustainable standards in IT and by IT increasing the pressure with speaking out of one voice. And in the meantime, it just got developed. We've got changed a bit of the focus to AI and now we are defining currently together with roughly 50 people from such kind of companies and member companies, but as well supported by science, by the UN Global Digital Compact, by World Bank and certain others, what is responsibility in AI and what does it mean as a standard. And this creates currently guidelines and this creates white papers and a bit of a framework which is being released in roughly three weeks, so end of June. And the idea here is to… Again, define a standard which currently only has certain angles and certain local aspects. So there is, for example, the European AI Act, which got defined about two years ago. But this is, first of all, not comprehensive. There's very little in it, which is on environmental aspects, for example, water consumption and stuff. On the other side, it's European and it doesn't have a global reach. And so therefore, what we try to do here is in defining that things. And my job there is in supporting the board as a member of the board in adjusting then maybe strategic angles to take as an NGO as a whole. as you can clearly guess already, so the US headquartered NGOs are quite heavy under pressure at the moment. So if you're talking about diversity, equity and inclusion, which plays a major role, if you go in ethics, for example, for AI, as well in standards for sustainability, this is quite difficult at the moment for all the US people. In the board and even for us being an US headquartered NGO. So what we're trying at the moment is to change a bit of the pressure more to European sides. We are creating a newly adjusted European advisory board and we are then trying to push things more from that angle because we can. We are still in the democratic freedom to talk openly about things and we are still able to just push things further in… regard of diversity aspects.
Gael Duez (41:14)And in Europe, science is not a gross word. So we can keep on talking about it on fact-based rather than belief-based. now circling back, so thanks a lot for all these explanations about the symbol.it.org and how also it helps us understand better what is at stake at the moment with the US. With your members, and maybe it's too early for you to answer, but how do you advise them to embrace AI wisely. Mean, do you have some concrete example or is it too early to say?
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (41:48)No, I can at least give some maybe one, two ideas into that aspect here as well. So what it all comes up with, and by the way, this will be promoted then as well and will be opened up to public as well with very concrete guidelines and practical how to start things and very practical examples from the big companies which are members of Sustainable IT. But one of the things is, again, transparency. So if I, and this is an example. Where German Railway, Deutsche Bahn, example, started already about a year ago or something. The usage of mostly then the on-prem AI solutions, so none of the big corporates is using public ChatGPT or Mistral or anything else. They do have their own on-prem solutions for data privacy reasons, which do have then with an API for sure the large language models of big solutions on the market or copilot and everything else but they still have their own on-prem solutions. That means they do have an opportunity to influence how it's been displayed. And one of the things Deutsche Bahn did was displaying after a prompt what was the energy consumption caused by that prompt. if anyone from Deutsche Bahn is using in their internal AI system ⁓ their large language model to create maybe the next PowerPoint slides or just an email to the next manager maybe asking for a celery raise, then there is an immediate response which just shows the prompt you just used did cause 25 kilowatt hours of energy use. So that is one of the very concrete examples which I would propose if you're in a big corporate surrounding to just come up with a bit more of understanding and awareness. And what it requires then, and this is maybe a next example, if you're working in a smaller surrounding just using AI from public offerings ⁓ in maybe paid options like OpenAI, Mistral, with Luchette or anything else, then it is again on training. So don't hand it to your colleagues. Don't hand it to your employees just completely without guidance, without awareness, without a training. They need to understand what the outcome is all about. they need to understand sometimes a small language model would do and sometimes even a Google search would do. Well, maybe a bad example because Google just wiped off the standard Google search and replaced it with AI.
Gael Duez (44:04)Yeah.
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (44:07)What I was going to say is you need to be, again, aware. And that awareness could either come with transparently showing it. If you do have the ability, if you don't, start things with a training. now maybe to those who are just listening, say, well, we still don't use AI within the company. I bet you do. You just don't know about it. And you just don't maybe want to know about it. Because if you, as a company leader, are not providing solutions for your employees, they'll find their own ones. And I mean, it's very easy to register for the full free versions or just pay, I don't know, $10 or $15 per month for Le Chet or anything else just on your private account and still use it in the company surrounding. And I am sure in most of the companies, a lot of people are using already AI, even if there is no official answer, no official provided service form from the company perspective. So training, training, training.
Gael Duez (45:00)I've never thought about shadow AI the same way as shadow IT, but actually it makes total sense. But thanks a lot for this. And thanks a lot for providing this concrete examples and the feedback from your position at sustainableit.org. I think we are out a bit of time now.
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (45:05)Yeah. So do we.
Gael Duez (45:21)Let's finish with a positive piece of news. What is according to you? ⁓ The news that you got recently that uplifted you the most. can be in sustainability in general, or it can be in IT sustainability more specifically. Feel free to pick the one you
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (45:40)Very good question. So I would like to maybe turn the angle again a bit into something probably unexpected, and this is whales. ⁓ So a very good friend of mine, is Frauke Fischer. She is a biodiversity expert from the university in Germany. And she wrote a book which is in German, Walmacht Wetter, or translated version, ⁓ whale is causing weather. And if you're interested in reading that book, I can highly recommend. It's something which explains how whales are influencing weather during their lifetimes and once they die. one of the positive news I recently read is due to whale protection, which is in most of the countries in the meantime a common thing, there is only very little exceptions, but due to whale protection, the number of big whales and blue whales and the whale population in general just got… way, way, way better than what it used to be and what it looked like and way better than what got expected. And this is, to me, just an example if we really want to make things happen, if we are really willing in changing something and the transformation is then understood from the majority of people. If there even is a couple of people declining or still not believing in things, if the majority is following that path, we are able to make things happen and influencing in a positive way. And this is exactly what I would like to maybe use as a closing remark for myself.
Gael Duez (47:04)I love it, especially because I go whale watching every year. That's the sort of ritual before going back to school because in Réunion Island, that's the perfect timing. But, I love it.
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (47:17)I didn't even know about that. You're well watching. at that. So without speaking about it upfront, I touched something which is close to you as well. I love that.
Gael Duez (47:24)Excellent. Well, Thanks a lot, Rainer, for joining the show today. And I'm really looking forward to hearing you on stage at Green IO Munich. And thanks a lot for joining there as very happy.
Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (47:36)Thank you very much, for having me. It was a great pleasure talking to you and looking forward seeing you soon.
Gaël Duez (47:41)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. 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 our website, greenio.tech. If you enjoyed this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with other responsible technologists is also a good idea to provide them with inspiration. You got the point, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more listeners. 
In our next episode, we will welcome Anita Schuttler, a well-known IT sustainability expert involved in many NGOs to talk about the latest developments in green software engineering. By the way, 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. Munich was a huge success last week and the next one is in London on September 23rd and 24th. 
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How is sustainability covered in main tech conferences? 
Sure cybersecurity, DevOps, or anything related to SRE, is covered at length. Not to mention AI… But what room is left for the environmental impact of our job ? And what are the main trends which are filtered out from specialized conferences in Green IT such as Green IO, GreenTech Forum or eco-compute to generic Tech conferences? 
To talk about it Gaël Duez sat down in this latest Green IO episode with Erica Pisani who was the MC of the Performance and Sustainability track at QCon London this year. Together they discussed: 

• The inspiring speakers in the track
• Why Qcon didn’t become AIcon
• How to get C-level buy-in by highlighting the new environmental rik
• The limit to efficiency: fine balancing between hardware stress and usage optimization
• Why performance and sustainability are tight in technology  
• Why assessing Edge computing’s positive and negative impact is tricky

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Learn more about our guest and connect: 

• Erica's LinkedIn 
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• Green IO website 
• Green IO Slack
• Gaël Duez's website 
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Erica’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode

• QCon London's "Performance and Sustainability" track with a list of all the talks/speakers
• Building Green Software by Anne Currie, Sarah Hsu and Sara Bergman
• Previous Green IO episode with Ludi Akue
• Previous Green IO episode with Sara Hsu
• Green Software Foundation
• Wilco Burggraaf's page on GSF which has links to his writing
  
  

Transcript (auto-generated)
Erica Pisani (00:01)Think sustainable technology is inherently performant for the most part. And I think that those two things actually they're pretty well associated with each other.
Gaël Duez (00:12)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 bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.
How is sustainably covered in main tech conferences? Sure, cybersecurity, DevOps and its DORA metrics or anything related to SRE is covered at length. Did I forget to mention AI? Not anymore. But what room is left for the environmental impact of our what are the main trends, which are filtered out from specialized conferences like Green IO or Ecocompute to non-specialized conferences, the big tech conferences. And to talk about it, I'm delighted today to have Erica Pisani with us. So Erica lives in Canada, Toronto, software engineer in a FinOps company. And when she doesn't work, she enjoys playing violin and working in the woods with her dog, which might give us hints on why she eventually managed to be the MC of the Performance and Sustainability track at QCon London this year. So I'm really glad to have you on the show Erica and that's going to be a great debrief that we're going to have.
Erica Pisani (01:42)Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. I'm super excited to join Green IO.
Gael Duez (01:47)You're more than welcome. So, Erica, how did you end up being the MC of the Performance and Sustainability Track at QCon London this year? And please share with us the long version where you explain how you started to get interested in IT sustainably in the first place and is there any, I don't know, maple syrup involved? Yeah, I know it's terrible cliche. Go for it.
Erica Pisani (02:07)No, no, I do love maple syrup. Unfortunately, it's not necessarily part of the story. But I guess the longer story is I originally, so the punchline, guess here is I came to sustainability in software development through edge computing. And really I started looking at edge computing because I just didn't know what the heck it was. A couple of years ago, every like cloud provider from, and I was working at Netlify at the time, every cloud provider from Netlify to Versal and Cloudflare and like AWS that were going on and on about compute power being available at the edge, data being available at the edge. My coworkers were so excited about edge functions launching and I straight up had no idea what they were talking about. And for me, the best way for me to learn stuff is to try and learn it as if I was gonna teach it, which is that age old advice. So to motivate myself to learn about Edge, I ended up deciding on a whim to pitch a lightning talk of I'm gonna talk about the Edge and I'm gonna talk about why it's important and exciting for software developers. No sustainability component in it whatsoever. It was just I wanted to learn more about it. And fortunately it got picked up because it was this huge thing. And I got extremely lucky that through the great vine of conferences, my talk got the attention of a member of the programming committee at QCon in 2023. so I go to QCon London and I can't remember what the track was at the time, but there was a sustainability track there at the time and Sarah Bergman was speaking. And I remember going to see her talk and I'm sitting there and I can't remember the name of the talk exactly, but she's, talking about the different scopes and the stuff that you see in the building green software book. And as I'm sitting watching her talk about this, I realized that the edge that I'd been focusing on for so long could actually play a part in the sustainability, sustainable tech movement. And so I ended up completely overhauling my talk because I was just like, just want to focus on learning more about sustainability in tech and how this can tie in and we can leverage it in this really amazing way. And I got so excited that like for me, felt like one of those turning points in how I view my career where I wanted to start looking through how I build software through that lens a lot more seriously. And because I was so excited about this, another programming committee member maybe about a year later because she kept hearing me talk about, and we kept in touch just because we met at the conference, got along. and she's like, so we have another like sustainable track that's going to be a QCon. And at that time I had been doing a few different conferences and was kind of tapped out. I was, I needed a break. So she's like, you don't have to do it this year, but consider it maybe for next year. And so, you know, 2025 Qcon London is about to roll around and she asked again like would you be interested and I was like I'm recovered I am ready to go let's do this and so that's how I ended up hosting the track this year.
Gael Duez (05:26)Excellent. That's really, really cool to kickstart with something you don't know and having this approach like I want to teach about it to make sure that I understand about it, which is I must admit a bit of my approach as well. Like I love ending up teaching pretty fast when I'm investigating a new field because that's the only way to actually put your brain is not always purely backed by science or research papers. So yeah, I got you on this one.
Erica Pisani (06:00)Yeah, and I don't know about you, but for me, sometimes when I'm in a rush to solve a problem, I sometimes hand wave over things I don't understand and just keep going. And when you have when you force yourself to like, okay, someone's going to ask this question, you have to understand why it's behaving in this particular way. It's so much better in the long run, but it's definitely always tempting to skip when you're when you just want to get the shiny thing working.
Gael Duez (06:14)Absolutely. Yeah. And it's especially true when you've got some momentum in the field, like in green IT or IT sustainability at the moment, where there are more and more. And that's the good news. There are more and more people getting involved, talking about it, posting about it. mean, my LinkedIn be read the entire, the eight hours nonstop with this sort of constant media production, we tend to forget about the longer form of thinking, which is reading a book or preparing a course. And that helps actually to structure much more the topics you're investigating rather than just, I've heard about him. I've heard about her. she read. She did something amazing. She said something amazing. But at the end, how do you connect all the dots is really missing. That's my feeling when I'm reading too much of my LinkedIn feed, which is, guess, the only social network that I'm still active in.
Erica Pisani (07:12)Yeah, no, I understand. And even just like all the newsletters available out there too. It's very overwhelming.
Gael Duez (07:16)Yeah, wow. Oops. And I play guilty for the green eye one, but it's a monthly only. It's a monthly only. I choose the rhythm for the reason.
Erica Pisani (07:24)It's one of the few that's like gone through my, what's the word now, my frequent like just purges of my newsletter inbox. It's managed to stay the test of time.
Gael Duez (07:32)Yeah. That's a good test. Erica, let's talk a bit about QCon this year in April it was. Were you also in charge of sourcing, finding the speakers?
Erica Pisani (07:51)Yeah, I was asked to be a track host. So QCon London happened in end of March, beginning of April, and I had to start doing my like, my research and reaching out in September, October of 2024. so kind of had the themes, I could make of it what I would. And I was responsible for almost creating the story that I wanted to tell in the context of performance and sustainability through the speakers that I was selecting. There were some restrictions because budgetary reasons for conferences, like on geographies. And obviously, they're hosted in London. They want to see some folks that are based in that tech community. But otherwise, the conference was really great for track hosts like myself to find who we wanted and invite them in.
Gael Duez (08:42)That's a pretty prestigious name. I guess when you reach out to someone, say, hey, would you consider talking to QCon and submitting a talk, usually the door doesn't slam on your face like, wow. Excellent. So that being said, what were the top trends you witnessed in green IT? within your
Erica Pisani (08:53)I'm not gonna lie, it was very helpful to be able to say I was coming from CubeCon London.
Gael Duez (09:11)Sustainability and performance track in QCon London, but also feel free to elaborate a bit on the bigger conference. It's just that I'm not 100 % sure that you had the time to actually enjoy the rest of the conference, so I don't want to push you out of your conference zone thinking, oh well, I read the program, but that's pretty much it.
Erica Pisani (09:29)I know I honestly, I was very glad my track was the first day because after the first day I was zonked. I can't imagine doing two days of a conference and then having to host the track. I'll start with the general theme of, guess, the wider conference from what I was able to pick out. Obviously AI is the thing right now. A lot of people are talking about AI's impact on the tech world, on the wider world. There was...
Gael Duez (09:34)Can you imagine? That's a different story.
Erica Pisani (09:55)Someone who, if I remember correctly, was giving a keynote even just like on design and how design is kind of being impacted in positive and negative ways with AI. There was a significant number of talks that talked about AI and if it wasn't the main feature, it was at least touched on and referenced on how it was impacting the topic that was being discussed. But would say there was still a good variety of topics being spoken about at the conference. It wasn't so dominating that it was just like QCon have become an AI conference. was just it because it's playing such a large part in software right now and has been for a couple of years. is understandably taking a lot of space in people's minds and there's a lot of questions. And so there's a lot of speakers that are stepping to the plate to talk about how AI is affecting things in different ways.
Gael Duez (10:28)Yeah, AI-con.
Erica Pisani (10:47)In terms of the themes of the performance and sustainability track, one of the themes that I would say, so in terms of the talks that were selected, they covered different things in general. I want to kind of talk about how you advocate maybe for sustainability initiatives at a leadership level, because one of the common questions that would come up from audience members is how do you get buy-in from the wider organization? There's a lot of software developers who listen about, yes, this does matter. We know it's important, but we still have to tell business leaders something to be able to take the time to experiment with gathering metrics, understanding what metrics do we need to gather. ⁓ As Sarah has mentioned before, I think in one of your recent episodes for Green IO, sometimes it's not entirely precise and that can be difficult to get buy-in for if it's not like you have a hundred percent certainty that these metrics are going to give you a clear picture of, let's say the carbon emissions of your software stack. And so one theme was like, okay, how do you get, how at it as an organization leader or organizational leader, how do you get buy-in from the wider organization and start adopting more sustainability practices so that you can move in the direction that you want to move? Obviously I had an AI feature there, so had someone come and talk about how to develop AI in more resource constrained environments. AI most of the time is talking about developing big LLMs with massive amounts of data. And obviously it's well known about AI's energy consumption. So I wanted to have someone be able to speak to how do you make AI performant in a smaller scale, which means that it's more sustainable.
Gael Duez (12:15)Yeah. Was the speaker, Okay?
Erica Pisani (12:30)Jade Abbott. So she is the CTO of Lolata AI and she's based out of South Africa and as she talks, I know the talk isn't quite, it's not live to the public yet, but she talks a little bit about how South Africa has unique constraints environment-wise. Like you can't depend on constant running electricity to be running these big, or training these large language models ⁓ for let's say like, you know, two weeks straight. So it was a really interesting talk to hear how to build those things. And then local first software is not just within a sustainability perspective, but in general, it's becoming more interesting across the board because it's a very performant way to build software. ⁓ And so that was something that we were able to highlight in this track. And obviously Sarah was on the talk and talking about, or on the track and was talking about metrics and how to gather that information. That's also a question people often have is how do information to be able to take action on it because you can't act on something that you can't measure and move toward a better outcome.
Gael Duez (13:37)Did she talk about the observability versus good old metrics debate?
Erica Pisani (13:42)Yes, yes she did. Yes, a little bit. She got like a lot of great stuff in the 40 minutes that she had. ⁓ And I'm actually excited when the recordings come out to rewatch it again because obviously there's so much information you take in a conference.
Gael Duez (14:00)So you mentioned the buy-in being one of the main topic. What would be the two, three, four main insights that you've got from these different talks? So Sarah's talk, ⁓ who else was actually talking about the buy-in, the C-level buy-in?
Erica Pisani (14:16)Ludi. And I wanted Ludi's, yeah, because she had experienced decarbonizing tech stacks ⁓ at one of her companies whose name I forget at the moment.
Gael Duez (14:20)Ludi, yeah, obviously Ludi, yeah. Loomi My daughter's got one so that's pretty easy. It's a story box.
Erica Pisani (14:33)Okay. Thank you. Hahahaha! Okay. That's really cool. So yeah, that was like probably the largest theme. And from there, it's like how to have more sustainable AI, how to develop more sustainable software. those were, think that like the big themes that came out of that track and that there were often a lot of questions about.
Gael Duez (14:57)Okay. So now I'm going back to my previous questions. How can we get some buy-in? What were the main insights shared by Ludy and Sarah and some other speakers? Do you recall some vivid examples of things to do or not to do, actually?
Erica Pisani (15:17)Well in, in Sarah's talk, she, and I, I realize it's, ⁓ it can, it can sometimes be a bit of a challenge to do this, but be okay with accepting the use of proxy metrics that are perhaps not perfect. And I think even to ask business leaders to do this is obviously a bit of a, is a bit of a challenge or like organizational leaders is a bit of a challenge, but even as a, speaking as a software engineer to have to take metrics that I know are not completely accurate is a bit challenging even for me to sit with. I think she made a very good point that it's better to have at least something that's somewhat approximate and close to what we want, and at least be able to somewhat measure it and improve it over time than to be completely blind as to what the state of the software stack is in terms of our sustainability initiatives, if we have them, or if we have certain concrete ones in the organization. And for getting buy-in,
Gael Duez (16:01)And measure the evolution.
Erica Pisani (16:14)Ludie, think really accurately summed it up or one of her great points anyway, was that it is a business risk ⁓ to just gloss this over. The weather is becoming increasingly unpredictable. Data centers are not necessarily going to be safe from these massive, seemingly once in a generation storms that seem to be coming every year. And taking that seriously now, even starting to get in the mindset of we need to think about this. I think it's only a matter of time and I think there's some, can't necessarily quote the specific regulations and stuff like that, but governments are starting to make it a regulatory thing. so regulatory considerations are something every business pays attention to anyway. So if you're getting on the right foot now, it makes it far less painful in the future because this this is going to come.
Gael Duez (17:06)Interesting this resiliency approach because it goes so much against our culture in the tech space at the moment which is like you know there is no limit sky is a limit which is actually true sky is limited it's called the greenhouse gas emissions in the sky is the the blood limit but that's a different yeah but that's a different that's a different issue
Erica Pisani (17:21)The literal limit,
Gael Duez (17:31)I think it's good that we have these talks and people speaking up on these and maybe rebounding on what happens around us. Like what happened in Spain and Portugal should be a wake-up call to pretty much everyone running a 24-7 infrastructure because suddenly you can have no electricity. For the moment, backup generator are available for everyone, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, But hey, for how long and what is the cost actually to running all of this?
Erica Pisani (18:00)Yeah, and at least closer to home for me, we had some terrible wildfires over the past number of years. Wildfire season starts increasingly earlier and earlier every year. ⁓ And I think probably the most memorable thing that happened with that wildfire season was a few years ago when the smoke from the wildfires in Canada were blanketing New York, and it seemed like an eerie Mars-like situation. ⁓
Gael Duez (18:00)It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was crazy. And not so fun fact, I use in quite a lot of my public talks now, the white fire in Canada to get some proportion from people and I'll ask them what is the size of the country that is equivalent to the burnt area from these white fires? And people that don't imagine, proper answer is Nepal. then when you put it like, you know, the Nepal map on the average European country or the average even US state, it's pretty big. Suddenly, you're like, oh my god, this is insane. But the problem is it's often pushed back as some ecological concern, And the connection with our tech world is not made that much. This is why all this water stress, for data centers, or energy stress becomes that much important. And you mentioned another trend that you nurtured in your track, was efficiency, software efficiency, running software with less energy. I guess Holly Commons talked about cloud zombies, were there other insights also? And what did she mention also?
Erica Pisani (19:30)Yeah. So obviously the zombie server thing is a good one. ⁓ Another one being that if I think that I'm gonna be paraphrasing here, but like efficiency is there's a limit to efficiency. There is a limit to how, and I think this is even worth noting in the sustainability context because we may take the idea that we may need to run fewer servers at a much higher degree of like utilization to help ensure that we reduce the amount of carbon emissions that we have. And there's a fine balance there where if you were to run servers maybe at too high of an efficiency, and the example that Holly had given was that of like a combustion engine, a car. There's a theoretical maximum efficiency that it has, but it's designed to run at far lower than that threshold because you don't want to wear the engine out. And similarly, that's something that we have to consider when we're trying to like resource capacity plan where we want to make sure we have enough servers to handle the amount of traffic, not as low as like, what was the quote that maybe like 12 to 18 percent of the capacity of a server's use that's obviously way too low. But we can't necessarily be at 90 to 100 percent because now we might be running the risk that our carbon emissions are related to the embodied carbon cost of having to replace our hardware frequently. And she also tied it back really well to just even like humans working way too hard all the time and needing to still take time to rest. And I think that's something that is important in a world like ours where we are trying to build more sustainable software in a world that is increasingly getting hotter. And it can sometimes feel like we need to work.
at 100 % all the time to get closer to that. But I Holly's talk in that it also reminds you to rest a little bit, take care of yourself because you can't be running at 100 % all the time.
Gael Duez (21:20)Do we need all of this? And all of this that far and that fast. That's super interesting what you've mentioned because it connects with two dots. first of all, what Holy Mansion is really literally backed by science and researches such as I know that I'm quoting him a lot, but
Erica Pisani (21:35)Yes.
Gael Duez (21:52)Professor PS Lee in Singapore was like this big expert on water cooling and really study the impact on hardware of how you manage a data center in tropical area. He has provided me tons of feedback and that was one of his feedback. The hardware, it has some sort of a sweet spot for running operations. And even if it's not like the max capacity, sold by the hardware providers, actually, above a certain threshold, you're really as you say, you're significantly decreasing its lifespan. So obviously, increasing the emission via the embodied carbon, because you will have to replace sooner the gear. And so that was really connecting in my mind when you mentioned it.
Erica Pisani (22:39)Yeah.
Gael Duez (22:41)And it also connected to something else that we should be cautious about all this talk about how much energy we waste or how much server capacity we waste. know, in Green IO Singapore this year, we had this talk from, this AWS software engineer. He was showing this graph of how unused capacities on average you could find on a standard AWS server, And I think we should be very cautious about this theoretical number and it might be proven way lower in true operational condition. And back to the track itself, about?
Erica Pisani (23:27)One of the, I think, things that was really exciting about the, like, just hosting the track too, is seeing, there seemed to be like this effect where as more people came to the different talks and people started hearing about the different topics that were in the track, there was increasingly higher amounts of people coming to the track as the day went on. And it seemed like a lot of folks...
Gael Duez (23:41)Okay.
Erica Pisani (23:53)We're really excited and really engaged. And I think that that's really encouraging to see that when folks are aware of the sustainability stuff that we can work on in tech that we have available to us, it seems like it's more we know what we want, we need to do, and we have some ideas of what we can do, and it's just a matter of executing on it. People are really excited to take that back to their organizations and start adopting it themselves. I know sometimes you see some talks where folks just don't know what to ask, but that's not what I saw at QCon. Everyone was super keen, which I love to see, and that made me really excited for my speakers as well, because I'm glad that they got to see just how excited people were about sustainable tech.
Gael Duez (24:44)and having a lot of questions is always a very good sign for a speaker, that's for sure. And actually, it connects with a question I wanted to ask you, all this momentum and people showing up more and more over the day, because I was wondering, why did you choose to name your track Sustainably and Performance? And was it the only angle performance to attract devs attention? Was it like if you had mentioned only sustainly or green IT, was it not enough? What is your explanations for this choice?
Erica Pisani (25:21)well, I have to admit, I didn't get to necessarily call the track that like it came in as performance and sustainability. I can make some tweaks to it, but for the most part, it was like, we have this idea that we would like this track to be this. do you feel comfortable playing together a track for this? And I think though, that it was well named because I think.
Gael Duez (25:25)Okay. Okay.
Erica Pisani (25:43)Like performance is something that a lot of software developers usually, that's often the stuff that they're running into in their day-to-day works and something that's very front of mind. They're dealing with like too slow of an application in this respect or ⁓ this database isn't responding well in this capacity. And so they're looking for solutions and ideas on how they can tackle the performance challenges that they maybe have and their organization, or they're anticipating that there will be challenges and want to know ahead of time. That being said, think sustainable technology is inherently performant for the most part. And I think that those two things actually they're pretty well associated with each other. And I thought I'd like, as I was building the track that angle I thought was very important to me because you the best of both worlds in this sense. You can look to build performance software and by looking to build performance software, you can work toward creating a more sustainable future with the tech that you're building. And I didn't want it to seem like you had to pick either or. There is a lot of opportunities for both. was also why I really doubled down on that title for the track.
Gael Duez (26:56)Yeah, makes sense. Anyway, if this is a wording that would attract people, I think you made a really good choice to use it to make sure that your room is full and then they got exposed to great content. If the room is empty, mean, that's pointless to have like the most technical possible talk on sustainability in scope one and two and three and four and what not. I got your point.
Erica Pisani (27:18)Yeah, but it is good even just to have a, almost like if you can envision the software that you ultimately have at the end of the day that happens to be sustainable and ultimately I want to see a sustainable future and so it's a little bit like I'm pulling that messaging in a bit. I think it makes it more real for people. It doesn't feel like an abstract theory.
Gael Duez (27:26)I completely got it. I've got a question. I'm always curious about what is mentioned when people are talking about sustainability and planetary boundaries and the likes. Was it like mostly about carbon and energy or where other environmental impacts such as water, resource exhaustion, et cetera, et cetera, also mentioned?
Erica Pisani (28:02)⁓ Water resources and stuff like that was mentioned in the talks themselves. Holly both called that out specifically in their talks. For the folks that were on the other side, the attendees, they tended to think more in terms of the energy.
Gael Duez (28:09)Okay.
Erica Pisani (28:18)Not to say that they weren't thinking also about the water usage and stuff like that, but I think usually when folks were asking questions, it was more like, want to reduce the energy consumption of my data center to reduce my emissions more than it's consuming X liters of water every day.
Gael Duez (28:34)Which makes sense because this is their main proxy metrics to act like on day one. If you decide to migrate your cloud or even to do like carbon aware computing, it requires the DevOps and the Ops and sometimes the SysAdmin to be put in the loop and it's a longer game and QoCon being really focused on Dev and DevOps, starting with energy makes a lot of what you shared is very positive news because I remember that three years ago in main tech conference just talking about energy savings was really a Revolution and now if it goes beyond and some talks mention also water That's a very positive sign. Okay
Erica Pisani (29:16)Yeah, and even those metrics, like we're getting better at tracking them, but Ludie called out in her talk, like it can be difficult to get really concrete measurements sometimes on that alone. And so if we're looking to gather more information on, let's say, water usage, that's going to be something that we'll have to advocate for with our cloud providers to start giving us more information in that respect as well.
Gael Duez (29:23)Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. makes lot of sense. Okay, so Erica, thanks a lot for the wrap-up of this five talks at QCon London. Can I ask you one last, maybe two last questions? What's next for you in the Sustainably Area, of course?
Erica Pisani (29:48)Of course. There's a few different things I'd like to look at on the side for myself. I've had a few different ideas kicking in my head, partially inspired by some of the talks I'd seen at QCon and just from following other folks in the field. One of them being because I, in my role right now at the financial tech company, we use Django, which is like a framework that's been around for ages. And I can't remember who the person was on Blue Sky that kind of gave me this friendly nudge, but there was this whole discussion happening in a Django forum of people trying to figure out how to best measure like carbon emissions or energy usage of Django apps. And there wasn't necessarily some good consensus on it. And so that's something that I'm hoping to take a look at at some point with what free time I have. ⁓ And then otherwise I'm still just trying to learn from everyone else right now. And what I am learning and at least having some ideas about it and blogging about. So that's kind of what's next for me right now.
Gael Duez (30:41)Okay, interesting sense. And you mentioned resources and stuff that you've learned. Would you like to share with the audience your main sources of information, except for QCon London, obviously, this year?
Erica Pisani (31:11)Yeah, I really like following the folks at the Green Software Foundation. Sometimes I'll take a look at, they have working groups that are looking at like developing papers on let's say recently, I think they did a working group on AI and I'm just interested in seeing what they're thinking of in terms of developing more sustainable AI. I also like following, I don't know his last name, but his first name is Wilco and he's very active in. Yes. So he's someone that I follow and just like pay attention to as well as, yeah, and Sasha Luciani, even though I don't work in AI, I still love listening to, or not necessarily listening to, but what she writes, I tend to read as well. And then I listen to Green IO, which is also how I've been getting some of my information.
Gael Duez (31:43)He's amazing. Yeah, thanks a lot. Okay, thanks a lot for this. And maybe to close the podcast on our usual positive piece of news, would you like to share something? I know that you're based in North America, so it's not that easy at the moment, but would you like to share a positive piece of news regarding sustainability or life in general? I don't know. ⁓
Erica Pisani (32:12)Yeah, sure. Like I mentioned before, I got like really interested in edge computing. I like I've gone deep down that rival hole of understanding more about how people are investing it and how it's growing over the years. And I think something that's got me really excited, and that makes me like, I consider a wonderful piece of good news is that as more distributed computing, obviously distributed computing is a thing already, but as it gets more adopted in an edge computing sense, there's really cool opportunities for things like smaller edge data centers incorporated into maybe urban environments where the data centers can heat buildings. And by being able to be used in that way, we can actually significantly reduce carbon emissions of heating buildings, which is a major, major source of carbon emissions. And that, I don't know why I'm nerding out so much about that, but I think that's an amazing piece of news, especially being in a colder climate like Canada.
Gael Duez (33:13)Yeah, I was about to say that in tropical area, that's kind of the opposite. what do you do with this extra heat? And, know, to bounce back on what you said, this edge computing and this CDN stuff and all of the likes is really something that I'm trying to investigate more and more because on one hand, yes, it can be the case at having, you know, less network to travel through, we can reduce somehow not the immediate environmental footprint of data because it has almost zero elasticity, but the would say midterm long term sizing of the overall network. it makes sense like to have computing capacity closer to the end user. But on the other end, if you look at how the world is decarbonizing, there are huge gaps. And I'm always wondering, if I'm going to try to take a North American example, but if I've got users based in Ohio, do I really want to do edge computing in Ohio far as I remember, the grid is pretty dirty there. Rather than hosting most of my server capacity in Quebec, where I think it's one of the lowest carbon electricity grid in North America. this trade-off, I think I've never seen any article, any research paper truly embracing it and trying to tackle it. So correct me if I'm wrong. And if any listener had some research paper, please send them my way. But yeah, that's a real challenge for me. And I'm curious to hear what you have to say because you're the edge expert. like, you know, talking about it, but I've got an expert. So I'm going to ask the question to the experts.
Erica Pisani (35:09)No, don't worry. So the question is more like how to balance like having edge data centers, let's say in dirtier grids compared to just hosting in. Yeah, no, that's a very good question. And I think I would also be very interested in this research paper should it exist. I think that is one of those things that it's gonna be one of those.
Gael Duez (35:22)Hahaha
Erica Pisani (35:32)Design architectural decisions because to your point, if I'm in North America and I, you know, being based in Toronto, I have this wonderful data center that is one of the greenest in the grid, not that like a four hour drive away from me. I would rather use that data center and test whether hosting stuff at the edge in Toronto makes from the reduction in the distance traveled of the request, does that make a meaningful difference to host that stuff here where we may need to be burning in the middle of winter fossil fuels to be able to supply the electricity grid? Or is it better to just rely entirely on the data center? I don't have necessarily a good concrete answer for that, but I think that there would, I would love to see there be tests done on that because depending on, I guess, the fossil fuel that's being used in that particular grid, there can be a very meaningful difference to hosting everything on the data center, not leveraging the edge, versus leveraging the edge heavily and getting the reduction in emissions from not having the request travel as far.
Gael Duez (36:41)Agree. If you ever want to resume your studies and do a PhD, you've got a research topic. But anyway, well, thanks a lot, Erica. That was cool to do this wrap up episode about QCon. I wonder if the listeners will enjoy it as well. So please feel free to comment.
Erica Pisani (36:49)Yeah, I have lots of material now. 
Gael Duez (37:06)Because if so, we will do more. are other great tech conferences also that are focusing more and more on sustainability, but it was also great meeting you. I was not aware of how involved you were in the field, so I'm very glad that we connected now. So thanks a lot for joining the show.
Erica Pisani (37:21)Thank you again so much for having me. This was a blast.
Gael Duez (37:25)Low carbon blast. Talk to you soon, Erica.
Erica Pisani (37:27)Low carbon blast, yes, always. You too, take care.
Gaël Duez (37:39)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. 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 our website greenio.tech. Now, if you enjoy this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with fellow software practitioners seems also a good idea, if they couldn't attend QCon this year. You got the point, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board.
In our next episode, we will welcome Rainer Karcher, a pillar of the SustainableIT.org association and a climate activist in a suit, as he likes to describe himself. We will talk about the importance of not deprioritizing future readiness, which is what is the current backlash against ESG doing, and what IT and digital has to do with it. Stay tuned.
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Why is the model of a Nobel prize winner not necessarily good science? What is “good” modelling? Is access to information enough to change a system behavior? 
This episode is the second part of a long interview with Laetitia Bornes, a Doctor in Human-Computer Interaction, Systems Engineering and Systemic Design who is one of the co-authors of a research paper investigating the claims made by the second hand digital platform Vinted about the avoided carbon emissions thanks to its operations. As presented in the first part, their findings were surprising, enlightening for the IT sector and nuanced! In this second part, Gaël Duez and Laetitia Bornes moved away from the Vinted use case and discussed modelling, the scientific method and Systems Thinking in general. You can enjoy this discussion without having listened to the first episode however we would suggest you do so to enjoy all the references, especially to the Vinted study. Among the topics covered in this second part are: 

• An impressive transparency exercise about the limit of the model used for the Vinted use case, 
• Why models are “wrong” and how to still use them purposefully, 
• Why a Nobel prize modeling in his lab without publishing isn’t doing science (yet), 
• Access to information and its connection to the four main categories of leverage points,
• The concept of protopia,

And much more!

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Learn more about our guest and connect 

• Laetitia’s LinkedIn 
• Laetitia’s website presenting her work in more detail
• Green IO website 
• Green IO Slack
• Gaël Duez's website 
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Laetitia's sources and other references mentioned in this episode

• The Rebound Archetypes tool co-designed by Laetitia Bornes 
• The Magnitude tool designed and co-developed by Laetitia Bornes 
• Decision-Making Under Environmental Complexity: The Need for Moving from Avoided Impacts of ICT Solutions to Systems Thinking Approaches by Laetitia Bornes and David Ekchajzer 
• Systemic Sustainable HCI: Integrating Collaborative Modeling into a Design Process to Address Rebound Effects by Laetitia Bornes 
• Les émissions évitées de la numérisation by Gauthier Roussilhe
• Vinted Climate change impact report
• Donnella Meadows’ Thinking In Systems: A Primer
• ADEME report: Environmental assessment of the direct and indirect effects of digital technology on use cases
• The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson)
• Your Life in Numbers: Modeling Society Through Data (Pablo Jensen)
• Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (Donella Meadows)
• Finding (a theory of) Leverage for Systemic Change: A systemic design research agenda (Ryan Murphy)
• Relating Systems thinking and Design (RSD) conference
• "Must read" books about the modelling part of systems thinking ("first wave" = "hard systems thinking"):
  • The Limits to Growth (Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Jørgen Randers, William W. Behrens III)
  • Business Dynamics (John Sterman)
  • Modeling social behavior: Mathematical and agent-based models of social dynamics and cultural evolution (Paul Smaldino)
• Important authors regarding the "second wave" of systems thinking ("soft systems thinking"): 
  • Soft Systems Methodology (Peter Checkland), 
  • The Fifth Discipline (Peter Senge), 
  • Critical Systems thinking (Michael Jackson), ...

Transcript (auto-generated)Laetitia Bornes (00:01)The problem is when you put a model that has been made for a given purpose in the hands of someone who doesn't know who doesn't want to recognize its scope and who therefore uses it outside of its field of validity.
Gaël Duez (00:18)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 bite 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 favourite podcast platform and, of course, on our website greenio.tech.
This is the second part of my long episode with Letitia Born, a doctor in human-computer interaction, systems engineering and systemic design, who is one of the co-authors of a research paper investigating the claims made by the second-hand digital platform Vinted about the avoided carbon emissions thanks to its operations. As we saw in the first part, their findings were surprising, enlightening for designers and nuanced, with potential applications for the entire digital industry regarding how we assess its potential footprint and handprint, that is the positive impact it brings on our planet and our societies. In this second part, we moved away from the Vinted use case and discussed modelling, the scientific method and system thinking in general. You can enjoy this discussion without having listened to the first episode. However, I would suggest you do so to enjoy all the references, especially to the Vinted study. So Laetitia, when we were discussing how you model the vintage use case and all the results that came along, I had like a ton of question about what are the limit to modeling? What are these assumptions that you built your research paper on, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it's a great opportunity to have a trained researcher, a doctor now on the show to discuss a bit about not the vintage use case itself, but how we actually can do systems thinking in a proper scientific manner. And maybe it's a bit provocative here. My first question about it is, because we know that there is limit to model everywhere, where are you unhappy with the way you model the vintage use case? Whether it's a boundary that you would have changed, some proxy data, which you would have preferred having primary data instead, or it's assumption that you couldn't really double check or shortcuts that you had to take. It's just a sort of transparency exercise that, it's not because you've got a published research paper that everything is flawless and that you didn't have actually to put limitations to the scope of what you wanted to investigate.
Laetitia Bornes (03:43)Yeah, So I would say that ⁓ I regret that my model focuses mainly on carbon emissions and not on the other impacts, apart from the loss of income from charities. But this is linked to the fact that I drew on the value study, which focused on avoided emissions in carbon equivalent. I've also made a big shortcut by displaying the number of sales per month to assess the economic viability of a scenario. Because if you change the business model in an intervention scenario, instance, by to a subscription then the economic viability would no longer depend on the number of sales with delivery, but on the number of users. It's not really complicated to change in the model in reality. It's just that I've never taken the time to do it. also, I must admit that the system that calculates the sales per month is quite basic and not really realistic. But all of this is not really a problem for the purpose of my modeling, which was only to demonstrate the sensitivity of assumptions and the fact that very different results can be obtained on the basis of the same study if we include other indirect effects. I wanted also to demonstrate the value of transparent and dynamic modeling and of comparing interventions to strategies. So I did it with the help of the that participated to my workshops. ⁓ And yeah, so I wanted to carry out a formative evaluation of magnitude, my modeling tool with professional designers that I ⁓ could do so as well. it depends on the purpose of your modeling. In my case, the way I use modeling is really not, let's say, rigorous, ⁓ even if it's shocking, because the aim is to predict precisely something. So yeah, in my case, it was to demonstrate some things. If I would have done it for Vinted in a real we would have made it more rigorous, for sure. Yes.
Gael Duez (06:09)That was the exact question that I wanted to ask to bounce back on what you said, because thanks a lot for this transparency exercise, but also to remind people that we model things in a certain way to achieve certain goals. And your goal was not to provide Vinted a better model to assess their claims on avoided emissions. And that being said, as you just mentioned, what would what have done differently if the model had a different objective which is providing to Vinted a more accurate or a more nuanced way to assess their avoided emission? Could you just share maybe two or three examples? Obviously, you're not going to write a new research paper live on the show. I mean, you can do so if you want.
Laetitia Bornes (06:54)Okay. It's difficult to anticipate the things that we want to include in the model rely on the methodology. So before doing the methodology the actual people from Vinted, it's difficult to anticipate. But I think if I had all the time and resources that I want, I would have more investigated. The way people use the money they earn from sales and the impact of Vinted on the fact that people renew their word more frequently. So can we quantify how many users buy more items because they can sell it on Vinted? That's something that I would definitely investigate and yeah, have a better idea of what people do with the money they are from but it's anyway you can do a new survey you will still have a lot of uncertainties and something that is not in the model but in my software and that is definitely lacking is a way of visualizing the quantitative uncertainties so you have uncertainties that you can't quantify but you have some uncertainty that you can quantify. And for the moment, my software doesn't help with So for the moment, get a range of uncertainty, you'll have to do for each context two scenarios, one optimistic with every parameter at an optimistic value and one pessimistic. And then you say, OK, I'm between those two values or graphs. to conclude, I said that it would depend on the whole methodology that I would conduct but those were the main things that I would like to investigate personally.
Gael Duez (08:49)Okay, so the level of uncertainty with as well as the direct connection between the sales and the amount of opportunistic buy. Am I right to say or am I missing some other items here?
Laetitia Bornes (09:09)Yeah, the rate of sale and the way people renew their wardrobe and also the way they spend their money on from sales.
Gael Duez (09:19)And actually, the third point was actually the way they spend it. And you beautifully explained it previously with a significant share, which is not quantified in this research paper, but that you could assess is that it is spent on fast fashion items. So it's actually not helping the planet that
Laetitia Bornes (09:43)Yeah.
Gael Duez (09:45)So, you know, while you were explaining in a very transparent way, all the limits and all the choices you made for your research paper I had this sentence bouncing back in my head. I think it's from a British statistician, George Epibox. All models are wrong some are useful. And I had this sentence a lot in my mind also when we were preparing this episode. And I wanted to ask you how wrong was your Vinton model and was it still useful? But I think you already perfectly answered this question. But I had another question related to it because this sentence, all models are wrong, some are useful, is sometimes used in the wrong way to, for instance, push back against IPCC models defend other models which would question anthropic climate change. So to broaden a bit our perspective, I'd like to ask you this question. Why should we consider with more scientific robustness the modeling exercises done by the IPCC than the one done by a climate denier who holds a PhD in physics, let's say, or even a Nobel Prize, as in the case of the Dr. John Closer, And another way to put my question is, can you give us a scientific methodology, one-on-one courses in two minutes?
Laetitia Bornes (11:20)So first about the quotation. Actually, I included it in my thesis So that's funny that you mention it. And in its long version, it says in fact, all models are wrong, but some models are useful. So the question you need to ask is not, is the model true?
Gael Duez (11:31)Excellent.
Laetitia Bornes (11:43)Because it never is, but is the model good enough for this particular application? And in fact, this quote is absolutely not a criticism of models in general, but rather a way of saying that models should not be taken out of context. So the problem is when you put a model that has been made for a given purpose in the hands of someone who doesn't know who doesn't want to recognize its scope and who therefore uses it outside of its field of validity. So it's also important to understand that there are many, many different kinds of use for models. for instance, in my case, and it can be also the case if we have a look at models that are used by IPCC, ⁓ you have some models that are predictive models. So they seek to represent reality as closely as possible and to predict the future, which is possible if we are in a linear situation or if we know perfectly the mechanisms of evolution. So that's the case for weather forecasts, for instance, you have always a kind of uncertainty. And then you have exploratory and prospective models which seek to facilitate a reflection in the what-if logic. So we wonder what might happen on the basis of different sets of hypotheses which we consider to be likely or to be extreme and so on. So that's the way I use models for instance. So to come back to the question about the IPCC, there are different things. So the IPCC produces or rather evaluates and shares that are based on different sets of assumptions as a basis for reflection and political decision making. So these are what-if scenarios and they are exploratory. is kind of predictive of a situation assuming a set of hypotheses and they are perfectly legitimate within this scope. if we accept the So for instance, regarding the anthropogenic nature of climate change, there is exploratory about it. statement is actually unquestionable because despite the huge number of researchers and increasingly accurate climate models, no model has ever been able to explain the observed climate change without including human activities in the hypothesis. So… a proof of the anthropogenic nature of climate change. And I'm not necessarily able to go into more detail about it, I recently read a book by Pablo Jensen is called Your Life in Numbers, Modeling Society for Data. So this is the version in English, but in French, it's totally different. I think it's literally why we can't put our society into equations, something like And yeah, he is really good about explaining the different kinds of models and how the weather forecast model has become so accurate and why the anthropogenic nature of climate change has been proved.
Gael Duez (15:19)That's interesting what you mentioned because you say no model has ever been able to prove that the climate change has not a massive part of a human made, causality. However, we can find models of people and sometimes people with some degree in physics. We've got even, as I mentioned, the case of one Nobel Prize, not experts in climate, but that's a different question, but still a Nobel Prize, who would push a model saying that anthropogenic nature of climate change is not assessed. So I guess modeling is just the first part of the story. What makes a model the model or the source of truth at a certain point of time in history? Because science is always evolving. And what makes you so sure now, thanks to the IPCC work, for instance, that you say that it is an absolute truth that climate change is human made? And I know that I'm playing the devil advocates here, all the listeners in you, you know about it, but it's me playing a bit dumb saying, but I see other model and they're written by people who seem to be pretty clever. So which model shall I trust? Because you know, all models are wrong and blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah. So what would you say to these people and how would you debunk this partial approach to what is modeling and what is science?
Laetitia Bornes (16:53)Yes, so the problem is that unfortunately there are, as you said, some people who sound very serious but who use their influence to say things that are completely outside their field of competence. So it's a bit like getting a model to say something that is outside its field of validity. It's quite the same thing. So for example, although I'm a doctor, I don't have any legitimacy to talk about quantum physics. And if I did, I shouldn't be given any more credits than a bricklayer or a baker or whatever. what ensures the validity of science is the research system, although it has many flaws that we clearly don't have the time to go into here, I think. It is organized to verify the knowledge produced. So when an article is published in a serious journal or conference, it has been reviewed by several researchers anonymously who have judged it to be solid and well-funded. And even if a questionable article has managed to be published, then the scientific community can intervene to have it withdrawn. A scientist should only speak publicly about his field of research and particularly about his published research work, because the science is by the publishing system. So you can do ⁓ whatever model if you don't publish it. And if you made the assumption and the hypothesis behind this model in your lab alone, with nobody to check it, it's not science. And in the case of IPCC reports, there is a new assessment of the published literature. So this literature has already been assessed and published. And then the people from the research of IPCC, there is a consensus building in the relevance research community. So it's really difficult to get something much more solid than the reports produced by IPCC.
Gael Duez (19:05)I think that was our one-on-one crash course on scientific methods. Thanks a lot for reminding this to us. Going back now to the question of a model and systems thinking, I promise I will stop grilling you and you can go back to your normal life because otherwise this episode will last for four hours and we don't want to do this. But to prepare our episode, and to be honest, also to use it in my new Green IT course, I reread Thinking in Systems, the Seminole, Donnellas, Meadows book. And it connects a lot what you explained previously, starting with the importance of system boundaries and using the model for answering the right question and not trying to use the model to answer all questions and really fit for purpose, I would say. However, there's something that really puzzles me in her book, which is an emphasis on free information and short feedback loop. And she sees it really as the number one tool to influence the system, mostly for positive outcomes. And today we have access to all the information about climate change, resource exhaustion, etc. And it seems that our willingness to act for the greater good of the entire planet Earth system, or would say our capacity to embrace complexity is actually reducing. And I was wondering, and that's super incredibly pretentious to just state it, but did she miss something? Or much more likely, is it me who's missing several things? Like, is it a case of bounded rationality, especially our biases, a bit like you explained with the researchers out of their scope of knowledge, I would say, or the information flow being crippled by the frequency and quantity of inflows in our digital world, or information being too manipulated. But I really wanted to get your feedback. And I know it's really like pure systems thinking theory about the importance of information to enhance a system and why she puts so much emphasis on it and why it doesn't seem to work despite having such a great access to information today. You've got a lot of time to answer this question.
Laetitia Bornes (21:36)Perfect. So first, thank you for mentioning Danila Meadow's work and the levels for intervention that she worked on. So I obviously rely on Danila Meadow's work and on her identification of levels for intervention. I just don't use the 12 leverage points which seems to me to be too detailed and too complicated to explain to people. But I rather work with the four main categories ⁓ of leverage points. So the fourth one would be acting on the constants and the parameters of the system. The third one would be acting on the feedback loops and delays. The second one would be modifying information flows, as you mentioned, and changing system rules. And the first one would be changing the goals of the system and maybe altering the underlying So as I understand it, these levels should be ideally combined because they are moving from the fourth category to the first one, levers are from the fourth category, are quicker or easier to mobilize, but more effective just in the short term. And the first category of levers longer and longer to mobilize, but they are increasingly powerful in truly transforming a system over the long term. So you might want to combine them and not to act only on the long term ones. unfortunately, as we mentioned, providing information is not always enough, especially when it remains abstract. 
Gael Duez (23:32)Environment, you mean by abstract?
Laetitia Bornes (23:34)Yeah, because you know about the climate change, you know about the impacts of what you buy, not always in fact actually. So have the information in our world society, we have it partially, but anyway we have a lot of information about climate change and environmental impacts and so on. But it remains abstract because it's figures or because it's events that are not always we are actually living. So you have some people that are quite shocked because they knew a landscape and this landscape changed affected by climate change.
Gael Duez (24:13)Like the glaciers or things. Like this.
Laetitia Bornes (24:16)Yes, so I think that if the social environmental impacts of a certain type of conception or a certain type of actions were to be felt immediately and in a very tangible concrete way by the people at the very point of the this would mean that we would somehow act on the delay of the propagation of information. And I would say on the intensity of the information or the way it is felt. I think that this would change things radically. And above all, from what I have understood, beyond information, you have this profound paradigm shift. And this paradigm I think that the way that the information remains abstract is kind of a barrier between this information and the paradigm shift that we need. So when I say paradigm shift, it's what's acceptable in our society, we value, when we make decisions and so on. So yeah, I think we have information, but it remains partial to just some people and this information in an abstract form. I'd like to say that it's not a problem to question the work of Donela Medos because actually she didn't hide the fact that she identified those categories of leverages intuitively and that further research was needed on this subject. There were not a lot of research afterwards. And in fact, a researcher called Ryan Murphy, so he's a systemic designer. He has published a year ago or maybe two years ago, an article on this subject, which explains this very well and which invites the scientific community to continue research into the categories of leverage. So yeah, that's supposed to be a work in progress, but people use it as a recipient. I think it's really useful for thinking about possible intervention. And for instance, I used it in my case study, for instance, in Vinted. As I said, there are different levels of intervention. And I gave these four categories to my designers, my participants, so that they can think of different kind of interventions. for instance, about information, they would informing the users about the environmental cost of a clothes, of an item. Or system rules would be banning certain ⁓ brands of fast fashion from the platform. But then if you move to the paradigm shift, there would have other ideas like enabling closing exchange or promoting clothing repair and customization. So you know you can have a strategy that would combine these different kinds of approaches and of levels.
Gael Duez (27:24)So that is so much interesting. And I could go on and on and on and asking you tons of other questions. thanks for the honest answer that it's still working progress. It really had this feeling and that was just a feeling thought pretty much worthless that she comes from a generation where internet was not invented and she lived long enough to say it's wide adoption, but sharing information was key and they lived on this assumption. Like you just share information and that's it. And now with all the elaborate answers that you provided like here, but there is information and information there is abstract information and comprehensible information. There is information in how people are ready to receive it because of all these values and all the, as you mentioned, the potential paradigm shift that will be required to people to actually accept this information or accept to do something with this information and so on and so on. So I'm parroting what you say. So I'm going to stop here, but really I think this work in progress approach that you mentioned is super important because it's not information for the sake of information and we will share obviously the link to Murphy's article. Now, if you indulge me one last question before the usual closing questions. It will be also related obviously to systems thinking. And I was wondering also rereading this book, is systems thinking compatible with the way our societies work now? And by this, mean, I'm especially concerned with this crazy focus on short term that we have. can, for instance, see it with listed companies having to display quarterly revenues and so on. And even more like physiologically speaking, the chase for this immediate shot of dopamine that is provided a lot by our digital platforms. I was really like my fist in thinking is somehow the quest for some sort of long-term understanding of things and is our species, at minimum is our society and especially our Western world still compatible with this sort of long-term thinking? And once again it's a question I guess you can take several days to answer but I just love to get your immediate reaction on it and I promise after that we're done because otherwise you will stay with us for days.
Laetitia Bornes (30:06)So I think that systems thinking is not only compatible with the way our societies work, but it's essential more than ever because we are in an increasingly complex inter-twin set of social-technical systems. So yeah, I think it's more necessary than ever because otherwise we can't understand the systems we are evolving in. Regarding the short term and ⁓ shoot-up dopamine things, think certain thinking should be maybe, yeah, it requires some time. ⁓ It's not as immediate as other stuff. So it has to be explained. Maybe we have to prove its efficiency on the long term to make people accept it. But I think there is a lot to do in the education system. And without exactly mentioning it, there is a really nice book about that that is wrote by Sean, and that is called The Reflective Practitioner. And he explains how we have specialized education in silos and why it's not relevant to the complexity of real world. So that's, I think, a good reference to mention here. So I think maybe it should come from education. I don't know exactly how, but I think that it's necessary more than ever and that in all sectors. So I think it's essential to use system thinking to debunk or at least reframe false good ideas of innovation. If you look at AI with a systemic perspective, the claim benefits the adults on the floor long. So yeah.
Gael Duez (32:11)You see things in a very different way when you embrace systems thinking. That's for sure. And actually, and that's going to be a smooth transition. For people interested in system thinking and being sort of beginners or just like amateur, I would say, besides Donnela Amido's book, would you have one or two resources that you would like to share with them so that they could sort of ramp up their knowledge in this field?
Laetitia Bornes (32:41)Yes, sure. So ⁓ if we hold the first generation of systems thinking, which is more about modeling, I would recommend definitely Limits to Growth, which is also written by Danila Meadows and her husband and other folks. I also would Business Dynamics written by Sterman. And the more recent book by Smaldino, which is called Modeling Social Behavior, Mathematical and Agent-Based Model of Social Dynamics and Cultural Evolutions. So that's for the of systems thinking, but there are many branches of systems thinking. And I would also definitely recommend Checkland, Senge, and Michael Jackson, which is a system thinker and not a music artist.
Gael Duez (33:40)And as usual, we will share all these references in the show notes. So it will be super easy for people to double check these books, all these articles. Maybe just for people already quite literate in systems thinking. mean, what is the latest cool stuff in the research field? Beside your work.
Laetitia Bornes (34:01)I don't know if it's the latest cool stuff, I think that if you're already familiar with systems thinking, should follow conference called Relating Systems Thinking and Design. So I'm making an advertisement for systemic design, which I think is really useful and interesting and I think it's definitely worth following the work of Ryan Murphy, whom I mentioned earlier, because he a lot of really interesting stuff.
Gael Duez (34:36)Okay, excellent. Thanks a lot. That's going to be a lot to digest for the readers. Maybe, and that will be my final and usual question, we shared a lot. was both very hands on with this Vinted case and very theoretical. And that's good sometimes to tool up with theories and models to be able to embrace the complexity of the world. But just to finish on a more optimistic note, would you share a piece of good news regarding sustainability, with the listeners.
Laetitia Bornes (35:07)So it can be maybe related to systemic design, but what interests me a lot at the moment is the concept of protopia. I think that we have a lack of future perspective and that's a real problem. And usually in future scenarios,  we used utopias and dystopias, which are extreme future scenarios. So they are provocative, they are thought provoking, but they don't bring us together or they don't prepare us for the future. They don't open up any perspective, because they are so extreme and protopia is somewhere in between. And it's a way of imagining more plausible and desirable futures and I think that it's something that we need or or personally that I need so recently I've read a book called the Ministry for the Future written by Robinson and I think that we need more of these kind of books because it gives actually a perspective on what could really happen in the future without necessarily. Let's say, caricaturing things to the extreme. even if it's not a perfect perspective, that gives us some perspective.
Gael Duez (36:30)I love the book that I didn't find the time to finish, to be honest, but I love the concept and I love this concept of protopia. I've never heard of it, but I was very aware of the pushback reactions that often come with either utopia or dystopia, with people saying, well, it's not plausible, as you've mentioned. Thanks a lot. Love the word. And thanks a lot for joining for this super long double episodes. I really do hope that listeners will at least pick one of the many resources that you shared with us to embrace a bit more system thinking systemic design and so on. Thanks a lot Laetitia and once again it was great to have you on the show, was great to have you on stage not technically speaking but represented by David at Green IO of Paris and I hope that we will meet again either in a conference another episode.
Laetitia Bornes (37:32)Thank you very much for inviting me. Really, I really appreciated this discussion. So yeah, thank you.
Gael Duez (37:39)You're welcome. 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. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with other responsible technologists seems also a good idea to provide them with tools and resources about modeling and systems thinking. You've got the point, being an independent media. We rely mostly on you to spread the word to more environmentally aware peers. In our next episode, we will meet Erika Pisani, a seasoned software engineer, to debrief the last QCon edition from a Green IT perspective. Erika was indeed the MC of the sustainability track of this prestigious conference. Stay tuned. One last thing. Visit greenio.tech to check the next conferences we organise. New York was a blast two weeks ago and Munich is in five weeks with almost all the speakers already disclosed. As usual, you can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you fellow responsible technologists build a greener digital world.
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Can a digital company be “carbon negative”? What should we think of these claims of “tons of carbon avoided” coming from 2nd hand platforms such as Vinted or Back Market? Dr Laetita Bornes conducted research on Vinted claims, investigating its data sources and the methodology used with her colleague David Ekchazer. Their findings were surprising, enlightening for the IT sector and nuanced! Among the ones she share with Gaël Duez in this first part of the episode were: 

• The pitfalls of assessing "Tech for Good" even using Life-Cycle Analysis, 
• The complexity of rebound effects and other indirect effects,
• How to improve things as a Designer, … and as a CEO!
•  The need for a systemic perspective and some tools to build it,
  and much more!
  
  

And because this conversation was so rich that it couldn’t be reduced to a one hour discussion, this episode comes in 2 parts, the first one focusing on the Vinted use case and the second one where we discussed modelling, the scientific method and Systems Thinking in general.
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Learn more about our guest and connect 

• Laetitia’s LinkedIn 
• Laetitia’s website presenting her work in more detail
• Green IO website 
• Green IO Slack
• Gaël Duez's website 
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Laetitia's sources and other references mentioned in this episode

• The Rebound Archetypes tool co-designed by Laetitia Bornes 
• The Magnitude tool designed and co-developed by Laetitia Bornes 
• Decision-Making Under Environmental Complexity: The Need for Moving from Avoided Impacts of ICT Solutions to Systems Thinking Approaches by Laetitia Bornes and David Ekchajzer 
• Systemic Sustainable HCI: Integrating Collaborative Modeling into a Design Process to Address Rebound Effects by Laetitia Bornes 
• Les émissions évitées de la numérisation by Gauthier Roussilhe
• Vinted Climate change impact report
• Donnella Meadows’ Thinking In Systems: A Primer
• ADEME report: Environmental assessment of the direct and indirect effects of digital technology on use cases
• The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson)
• Your Life in Numbers: Modeling Society Through Data (Pablo Jensen)
• Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (Donella Meadows)
• Finding (a theory of) Leverage for Systemic Change: A systemic design research agenda (Ryan Murphy)
• Relating Systems thinking and Design (RSD) conference
• "Must read" books about the modelling part of systems thinking ("first wave" = "hard systems thinking"):
  • The Limits to Growth (Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Jørgen Randers, William W. Behrens III)
  • Business Dynamics (John Sterman)
  • Modeling social behavior: Mathematical and agent-based models of social dynamics and cultural evolution (Paul Smaldino)
• Important authors regarding the "second wave" of systems thinking ("soft systems thinking"): 
  • Soft Systems Methodology (Peter Checkland), 
  • The Fifth Discipline (Peter Senge), 
  • Critical Systems thinking (Michael Jackson), ...

Transcript (auto-generated)Laetitia Bornes (00:00)We shouldn't reduce this complexity to a single figure. I don't think we should stop a second hand platform at all, but I think we should rethink the way they are designed, service design, the platform design, the business model design, so that we improve the carbon emissions or maybe other social environmental
Gael Duez (00:26)A lot of phones raised in the air at Green IO of Paris last year when her colleague, David Ekchazer shared their findings on stage. Not sure it was good for the people's individual footprint, but a clear signal of the interest of the participants for the topic of avoided emissions and how to assess the true impact of tech for good companies. And it was indeed big numbers which were discussed there, with Vinted, the second-hand marketplace at Behemoth now in the circular economy field, claiming they avoided 680 kilotons of CO2 equivalent thanks to their operation. It's not the only company doing so. Backmarket, another platform specialized in second-hand electronic goods, assessed the greenhouse gas emissions saved thanks to its operation to have reached accumulated 1 million tonne of CO2 equivalent in 2023. A CTO was in a Green IO podcast earlier this year and she made no mystery that these statements and their overall mission is a massive asset for employee engagement and retention, both PhD students, decided to apply the latest research in systemic modeling to investigate these claims and their findings were surprising and enlightening for the IT sector and nuanced. Yes, it's still possible to have a calm discussion about a complex topic these days.
Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Laetitia, the co-author of this paper, who couldn't be on stage at Green IO Paris because she was finalizing her thesis defense before completing her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction, Systems Engineering and Systemic Design in Toulouse, France, Laetitia worked for five years as a UX designer. Her research has resulted in the development of a methodology and tools to enable designers and decision makers to address the complexity of sustainability with a particular focus on the indirect effects of digital technologies. Specifically, she has developed Rebound Archetypes, a workshop and a card game for anticipating and mitigating rebound effects, and Magnitude, a software for the consequential modeling of direct and indirect effects to inform environmental decision-making. So, welcome on the show, Laetitia, and congrats for your graduation. Shall I call you Dr. Borne now?
Laetitia Bornes (03:02)Thank you very much for your invitation. And yes, you can call me that since last December, but really you don't have to. You can call me Laetitia.
Gael Duez (03:13)Okay, so let's stick to Laetitia. A bit of context first about these IT companies positioning themselves as tech for good companies. And honestly, from an outsider perspective, it seems pretty obvious that they do. So the companies enabling or accelerating the circular economy seem to be part of the good guys in our fight to make our economic system, would say, compatible with the respect of the planetary boundaries for sustainable human life on Earth. Here the struggle seems to quantify this positive impact, this handprint, the opposite of a footprint, which has gained some popularity since the 90s. Vinted tried it and you somehow debunked or maybe shall I say fine-tuned its claim. Could you explain to us why you conducted this study and its main findings?
Laetitia Bornes (04:09)Yes, of course. So that's a big question. So I will try to answer gradually and you can interrupt me if it's too long. So first of all, I would like just to add some nuance to the presentation of Vinted as a tech for good company. ⁓ That wasn't the original goal, in fact, of Vinted. So it was more about someone moving house and wanting to get rid of their clothes. So I don't know their intention now. in fact, wasn't ⁓ neither the communication until relatively recently, the slogan was, if you don't wear it, sell it. So it's more about making money. And in the case of Vinted, there are some clues in the design of the service and the platform itself that show that the primary goal is more profit. For example, the lack of any possibility to sort or filter by distance the results. It's because Vinted taxes transactions with delivery and therefore they have no interest in users meeting to do the transaction in which is in fact totally contradictory to reducing the environmental impacts. So I don't want to put Vinted on the trial now. And I can't speak for the other tech for good companies. And also, I want to insist on the fact that it doesn't mean that they can't have actually a positive impact in the end. And they can still bring their strategy in line with their communication.
Gael Duez (05:46)Just to bounce back on what you say, that's for true that I put BackMarket and Vinted in the same bucket in my introduction. And BackMarket, right from the start, they wanted to be B Corp and they positioned themselves from a very clear environmental perspective and being part of this sort of tech for good movement. And actually you're right to correct me because Vinted… It was not the original positioning. It doesn't mean that they don't do good things, but then as far as I know, not a B Corp or they didn't chase any take for good label or things like that. thanks for bringing this precision on my introduction, much appreciated. But please, okay. So your findings now, what did you find and how it can help other decision makers and people working in the tech for good environment to have a nuanced approach on how much good and how much avoided emissions they can claim.
Laetitia Bornes (06:40)Yeah, so first why we decided to do this study. So for my part, my objective was that I needed a case study to show designers the importance of rebound and indirect effects in concrete terms. So we have a specific case study and how design can be used to address those rebound effects. I don't know if I have to define rebound effects here.
Gael Duez (07:08)I was about to ask you to define rebound effect to make sure that everyone is on the same page. I'm pretty sure that a lot of listeners are familiar with the concept, but it's not that an easy concept to apprehend. yeah, feel please free to so.
Laetitia Bornes (07:10)Hahaha. Okay, let's say that the first observation of ⁓ rebound effect mechanism was called the Jevons paradox after the man who discovered it and concerned the coal train. So the introduction of a new, more efficient steam engine technology did not reduce the overall coal consumption and actually it increased it. And in fact, this mechanism is that the improvement in efficiency meant that less coal was needed per kilometer. So the cost of this transport per kilometer was reduced, making it more accessible to more people, increasing the overall consumption. So this is really the first definition of rebound effect. And in this case, it's the most serious case known as backfire the rebound effects is more important than the initial gains. But sometimes the rebound effects will just simply reduce the initial gains without exceeding them. depending on the community's concern, the term rebound effect is used to describe more and sometimes more complex mechanisms. So maybe we'll go back to this concept with some examples, but you can have not only the rebounds, but also the time rebounds, the skill rebounds. So if you make to people that wouldn't access it because of skills, for example, the driving license, if you have autonomous cars and you can take a car without a driving license, then we would call it a skill rebounds.
Gael Duez (09:11)this skill rebound, is the rise of all this software as a service solution a good example as well. let's take the example of podcasting. mean, 20 years ago, recording, editing and broadcasting an audio show was truly for professional. Now I can do it, and I'm not a trained engineer in audio So would you consider also the software as a service solutions that are mushrooming all over our digital world as a good example for skill rebound effect?
Laetitia Bornes (09:49)I guess actually it's a perfect example of skill rebound. Yes.
Gael Duez (09:55)Okay, and so I've got a good grade. I'm happy with it. And the two other rebound effects that you've described, they were the time rebound effect and the economic rebound effect. Could you share maybe an example for each of these?
Laetitia Bornes (10:11)Yes, economic rebound effect is the one I illustrated with the coal train. So something is more efficient, it gets less expensive, so you can use it more intensively or maybe more people can use it. Then the time rebound will be ⁓ if, for example, before when you had to mail to send a mail to someone, it was much longer because you had to write it on a paper, you had to go to the post station, and you had to send physically. Now you can send an more quickly. guess what? You are sending probably much more email than you would send a postal mail. So that's also a ⁓ time rebound.
Gael Duez (10:55)Yeah. Okay, got it. and if I try to keep on having good grades with you, professor, I mean, you're not a professor yet, but maybe you want to consider an academic career, but you're a doctor. So let's go for doctor. I think one very good example of the economic rebound effect in the IT sector is obviously the rise of public cloud services with much, much, much cheaper access to computing and storage facilities than it was the case before. And a lot of people accessing servers by literally just snapping fingers while before it was really expensive. Is it good example of this economic rebound effect?
Laetitia Bornes (11:37)Yes, yes, it's a good example as well. mean, you got it. There are a lot of rebound effects in digital technologies. And I didn't mention, but for example, for the time rebounds, you've got Gen AI. So all the things that you can do in less time, thanks to AI, you will probably do it more intensively or do other stuff that is carbon intensive with the time that you have freed. So
Gael Duez (11:48)Okay.
Laetitia Bornes (12:07)There's a lot of rebound effects in digital technologies, but in mind that rebound effects is just a concept. It's something to mentally understand some phenomenon. It's a bit fictional because you have to real scenario with a fictional scenario where a given technology wouldn't exist. So when I compare the postal mailing with email. Maybe it's a bit far in the past, you So it depends to what is your reference scenario. But yeah, in digital technology, you have a lot of rebound effects.
Gael Duez (12:35)That's a very important point that measuring a rebound effect simply doesn't exist. We assess a rebound effect based on different models, based on different methodologies, I guess, and using different scenario, and we compare two scenarios or several scenarios together to say, okay, if that didn't happen, all things equal then we might consider that we had this rebound effect. So it's bit of a theoretical, albeit very insightful exercise. Am I right?
Laetitia Bornes (13:21)Yes, absolutely. That's it. Yeah, you can't measure it precisely. You can just like, yeah, assess it. Exactly.
Gael Duez (13:29)Okay, so thanks a for all this precision on rebound effect and how they are conceptualized. it's very enlightening. Can we go back now to your main study, which is Vinted, and what were the main results and how did you build these results and these assessments and these modelizations as we just discussed?
Laetitia Bornes (13:51)Yeah, sure. So maybe a last word about the why. I wanted to have a concrete example about rebound effects and how design can intervene in the face of those rebound effects. And then I met David at a conference during the workshop on the assessment of indirect effects using specific methodologies, as you said that we called back in time, avoided emission methods. And we were both concerned about the potential limitations of these methods. David wanted to work on a consequential cycle analysis example. So we chose to work on vintage because it's a case study that illustrates many complex rebound and indirect effects as it's often the case, fact, in circular economy-based solutions. And because we had access to the results of a huge consequential study conducted by Valu on the vintage case based on a solid survey with over respondents, and which was very well documented, actually. So that's why we chose this case study. And regarding the main results of the study, there were two aspects. So first, the limitations of avoided emissions calculation methods that we identified. And then the opportunities that we identified in systemic approaches to answer to those limitations.
Gael Duez (15:30)There is so much to unpack here, but let me pause just for a second and ask you for clarification's sake, what is a consequential life cycle assessment?
Laetitia Bornes (15:43)Yeah, sure. as opposed to an attributional life cycle assessment, the consequential approach seeks to understand not only the direct effects, but also the indirect effects. And for that, we're going to compare two scenarios. One scenario is the real scenario where Vinted exists. And the other scenario is a fictional scenario, as I said, where Vinted doesn't exist. And to build fictional scenario, we rely on the answers of a survey. here, the survey that was conducted by Vyu, in this survey, they asked people, especially to buyers, what would you have done if Vinted didn't exist? So would you have bought the same item brand new elsewhere? Would you have bought the same item but secondhand as well in another platform like Le Bon Coin or at a charity? Or would you have bought it at all because this was impulsive buying and you were just scrolling the platform and saving for they asked if the seller would have ⁓ sold the item Vinted did exist or if they would it away or thrown it away, for instance. So then you can assess the impacts of each scenario. And when the impacts of the scenario where Vinted exists is lower, you can talk about avoided emissions.
Gael Duez (17:22)Okay, got I would love and I think we will go back to this methodology, the potential methodology bias and all the complexity, I guess, with administrating 300,000 people questionnaire and all the analysis, the different analysis that can be done with the answers. But just to sort of go straight to the results you mentioned that you've seen some opportunities and some issues as well with the, I would say, traditional claim that they avoided several hundreds of kilotons of CO2. Could you tell us what are those limitations and what are these opportunities that you've spotted?
Laetitia Bornes (18:08)Yeah, sure. So in the calculation methods, they ignored some indirect effects. to name a few, first, the study doesn't fully take into account impulsive buying, because in on the Vinted platform, you have some new or almost new clothes, sometimes new clothes with the tag. So in the case of impulsive purchases on the platform. If those clothes are new, the study doesn't take into account the additional impacts linked to the production of these clothes. They take into account the transportation of these clothes of impulsive buying, but not the production of the new clothes that were on the platform by impulsive buyers.
Gael Duez (18:59)How would you quantify impulsive buying?
Laetitia Bornes (19:04)It's with question actually so there is obviously a big bias because people just answer what they can and maybe they can have a desirability bias meaning that they will answer something think is socially acceptable. But ⁓ yeah the question is like would you have bought it if it didn't exist and if people say. Now I was just scrolling on the platform, then it's considered to be impulsive buying.
Gael Duez (19:36)Got it. So that's the first limitation, not taking into account impulsive buying. What are the other limitations?
Laetitia Bornes (19:45)So you have effects that weren't taken into account. For instance, fact that Vinted allowed ⁓ sellers to sell ⁓ their items. Some of them answered that without Vinted, it would have been too difficult to sell those items. They wouldn't have it on another platform. So they would have thrown it away or it away. So in those cases, the money that those sellers earn thanks to Vinted, the way they will spend this money will have some impacts, especially if they use this money to buy some new clothes from Fast Fashioned.
Gael Duez (20:28)Was it the case that people are actually using the money from second hand platform to buy fast fashion clothes? Did you quantify or assess this trend?
Laetitia Bornes (20:42)OK, so I quantify precisely because I relied on the existing Vayuu study. don't want to give some figures because I used the older reports from 2021. And there is a much recent report from 2023, I think. But you a part of the sellers who say that they will use the money earned from sale to buy brand new stuff. It's not precise if it's fast fashion, but I think it's quite obvious that you have, and it has been documented by researcher called Elodie Juge, that you have some vintage users who use the platform just to sell their clothes and to be able to renew their wardrobe more frequently without having to pay for it. So you'll have some users that buy some brand new stuff from fast fashion markets that will use items a few times and then sell it on vintage for almost the same price and then renew their wardrobe. So yeah, that's difficult to isolate and to quantify, but I know that from the survey. You could have the figure of people using the money earned from sale to buy brand new stuff.
Gael Duez (22:14)And so that's the second effect or side effect. I don't know which wording shall we use. Is it like all of these are rebound effects or do you have a more precise academic wording for it?
Laetitia Bornes (22:30)You have a lot of different taxonomies about indirect effects. They can be classified between the first order, second order, third order. You have a lot of different classification and personally in my research, to make it simpler to designers and decision makers, I consider all the indirect effects that are linked to a change in behavior or practice to be a rebound effect if it can have somehow negative social environmental impacts. So that would be, my perspective, not every researcher would agree with that, but from my perspective, this is a rebound effect.
Gael Duez (23:11)Okay, got it. so you mentioned several indirect effects, which are rebound effects because they actually reduce the avoided emission claims that is made or assessment because it's not necessarily a claim at this time of the study. What other are worth sharing with the audience?
Laetitia Bornes (23:30)So to conclude with the indirect effect, would say that in this kind of study of survey, not only the vintage one, the indirect effects that have social impacts are systematically excluded because they are difficult to assess. So that's one of the things we think is really big limitation is that those kind really focus on carbon emissions and not the other kind of impacts. And they also only on what can be quantified. And so for instance, by making it easier to sell their clothes, Vinted encourages people to stop donating to charities. And charities such as the Emmaus receive fewer donations, in quantity and quality. And this has an impact on their social and solidarity activities and on the vulnerable people they help. And that is impossible to quantify. that's not because it's not possible to quantify it, that it's not important. But that's why for me, a rebound effect can encompass things that are not initial gains, because initial gains are something we expect to happen, and this is linked to the intention and so on. So I would have a broader conception of a rebound effect, and those kind of rebound effects are not taken into account in these studies.
Gael Duez (25:04)And overall, and I know this is an assessment and that might be wild guessing. So it's not like a very precise answer that I'm expecting, but overall, would you say that your study found that we should reduce what is estimated to be avoided carbon emissions or that it is actually completely offset and we're in the sort of a Jevons paradox again situation where creating a secondhand platform does not actually help producing carbon emissions, but would increase it. So basically, where do you put the needle? it reducing the avoided carbon emissions, which has been estimated, or do you think that we're completely wrong and actually they are contributing to higher carbon emissions because of all of these indirect effects cumulated that you've just described?
Laetitia Bornes (26:03)It's a bit difficult to answer that question because there are so many uncertainties that sometimes you can't say if you are in the positive or the negative. What I would recommend, one of the statements of the paper that we worked with David is that it's not a good question. Maybe we shouldn't say, Is it good or bad? Maybe we should say, how can we improve it? also, if we focus just on the carbon emissions, because if you want to say if it's just good or bad, you need to have just one figure. So that's why we focus on the carbon equivalent. That's how you say it's positive, or no, it's not good, or it's negative. We have avoided emissions, and it's good. What we think is that it's more complex than that and we shouldn't reduce this complexity to a single figure. I don't think we should stop a second hand platform at all, but I think we should rethink the way they are designed, service design, the platform design, the business model design, so that we improve the carbon emissions or maybe other social environmental
Gael Duez (27:14)Laetitia, you're a perfect guest because I wanted to move the discussion from what you found to what could be done with this question that I asked quite often. And actually it comes with two flavors this time. My first question was, if I were Vinted's CEO and I was genuinely concerned about the social and environmental impact of the world and of my platform more precisely. How should I react to such a study? I mean, your research paper. And what should I change? In my second question, and you might want to articulate both of them, is if I were one of vintage product leader or UX leader what should I do? Because it comes with two flavors. You've got like the overall strategy that the CEO having some sort of a wake up call, and saying, my God, we need to change quite a lot of things in the way we assess, the way we run our business, et cetera, et cetera. But there might be also things that can be done at a lower hierarchical level without a full change in the strategy of Vinted by a product leader and UX leader. And I wanted to drop the two questions so that you can decide which one you want to answer first and how you want to articulate this two levels of decision, I would say.
Laetitia Bornes (28:34)So first thing, just the study that we conducted with David is not aimed specifically at the CEO of Vinted or at Vinted project or UX leaders, but rather at researchers and professionals who assess the indirect and indirect effects of digital technologies. So the purpose was not initially to evaluate Vinted, but to provide a critique of the methods used to calculate the avoided emissions or net impacts using Vinted as an example. being if the CEO of Vinted reads this study, he may have two reactions, I think. Either he is only interested in making profits and will therefore try to forget it or to discredit it or he may wish to improve on the social environmental impact, then take inspiration from the study or even contact us for more details and is invited to do So there are a lot of things that can be done at several levels and I think that they should be thought with a systemic perspective and that considering all these levels. For iinstance, I mentioned the example of the by distance of the results. You don't have it it would be bad for the business because the business model is to tax every transaction with delivery. If you change the business model to a subscription, instance, you will then want to have more users which will not want to have more transactions with delivery. So everything is connected and the way you design your business model, we have some impacts on the way you design your platform itself. And those things have to be thought all together. And that's why a methodology during my PhD, which is called modeling methodology and its collective modeling involving people from different hierarchical level in the company and also people from outside the company to reduce the risk of So yeah, I think that everything has to be thought all together. And now as a vintage product or UX leader, you can try to push for this kind of methodology to be put in place. actually occurred with a whose name I won't mention, but ⁓ they were developers, not designers, but they were sensitive to environmental impacts. And they a presentation of our work at a conference. It actually was last Green IO conference in Paris. And they contacted us to run a workshop just some awareness raising about indirect effects. And ⁓ one thing led to another, and we are now about to conduct the whole methodology with them over several months, involving a wide range of profiles, including different hierarchical levels. So that proves that it's possible as an employee to push this kind of methodology. Although it probably depends on the company you work in. But yeah, that's possible.
Gael Duez (32:04)Okay, I have to say that you didn't tell me this information when we were preparing the recording. So I've got like a big stupid smile on my face like, oh cool, the Green IO Conference has helped connections and move things in the right direction. So now I need to focus back because this super interesting what you've just said, but thanks a lot for the feedback because you made my day. So getting some focus back and thanks a lot for stressing how important it is to have a holistic view and putting all the different stakeholders around the table and using the workshop framework that you've coined during your research. And I get this is the right approach now for the sake of understanding, and I'm not saying this is what you say that should be done, but just for the sake of illustration, could you share? One or two other examples of features, change in design that you would see in the Vinted platform to offset or to counter some of these negative rebound effect, or actually rebound effect are always I follow your definition, for the Vinted platform. And as you say, there's nothing personal against Vinted, it's just for the sake of illustration. But you mentioned already the absence of filter for the location of the good. But would you add other features, design changes?
Laetitia Bornes (33:37)Yeah, sure. I worked with designers that weren't designers from Vinted, but that were professional designers interested in systemic approaches. And they worked on the Vinted case study. So I can share with you some ideas design to improve the social environmental impact of Vinted. And I definitely do not say that we should do all at once because it has to be strategy with different steps or let's say design interventions that must be coherent and that must be assessed before being put into place. you can have actions that can be from the lower level to the higher level. So a low level would be, for instance, acting on the direct of transportation. So for instance, using a better transportation system or things like that. We had the idea of promoting ⁓ group shipments, ⁓ providing local sales or collection points to reduce the transportation. Then you have other ideas to charities. Designer, they thought about a portion of the profits to charities or ⁓ redirecting users to donate to charities when a clothes didn't sell or when they reached a quota. with the tool that to the designers during the workshops, so the Magnitude tool, which is a modeling tool, they could compare different design strategies. And for instance, it was much more effective to redirect users to donate clothes in some cases, rather than donating a portion of the profits of Vinted.
Gael Duez (35:34)Would you reach such a conclusion? How can you say it seems to more efficient to donate when I cannot sell it rather than reallocate a portion of my revenues to charities?
Laetitia Bornes (35:46)So in fact, we modeled it in the magnitude tool. So we calculated the loss ⁓ of revenue for charities and we compared the difference between, for instance, donating 1 % of the profits of vintage, which would be huge, and redirecting the users to donate their clothes, maybe in, let's say, 5 % of cases. I don't remember the exact figure. So we just made that ⁓ seemed to be relevant to the designers during the workshop, and we compared it. And that makes sense, because when you give a portion of the profits of vintage you don't want to give a lot of this and this profit is just a few percentages of a given sale and if you redirect a seller to give his ⁓ item then whole price of the item goes to the charity so it's a much bigger impact, let's say. Does that make sense?
Gael Duez (36:59)It makes total sense. Thanks a lot. And this modeling was from an overall economical perspective, from the charity perspective were you also able to model the perspective from the user?
Laetitia Bornes (37:17)So this is part of the methodology, but it's not part of the quantitative model at all. So to be honest, the modeling tool is quite basic. It's like you could do almost the same thing with an Excel sheet, but it's dynamic. So you can have a simulation through different months or years. And it's more visual and it's easier to work with as a group of different stakeholders who are not experts in consequential modeling, for instance. But it's quite basic, and that's really a choice that I made. You have different, let's say that you have basically two approaches to model social complex systems. Or you can model with a top-down based on systems dynamics, and that's what I did. Or you can model with an agent-based approach that is more bottom-up and you are just describing the behavior of individuals, you put them together and you expect to have emergent phenomenon. my case, I considered that the people in the room, so the designers, makers, maybe academics, experts in textile industry and so on, would be more capable of imagining impact of something on the users than the model itself. So most of the things are in the brain of the modelers and the stakeholders involved. And a few things, just the orders of magnitude, and that's why the software is called magnitude, are in the model. So they would say, for instance, OK, we could put into place a virtual currency that really force the sellers in using the money they earn from sale on second-hand items, either on vintage or with partners. If we do that, we will probably lose this amount, this percentage of sellers. And we will just put in the model the variation of the number of sellers that we expect and the variation of the percentage of the money that is used ⁓ to buy fast fashion clothes, for instance. they will imagine all the emergent phenomenon, all the user's behavior, and they will make some hypothesis, and they will test it on the model just to have the impact on the final figures of the key indicators for them that would be carbon emissions, but also loss for charities and other impacts the model will be based on mixed data. of the calculation is based on data that you can find the literature, for instance, the carbon intensity of a kilometer traveled by parcel or a truck. Then you have some data that is based on the survey. So what is the percentage of people doing impulsive buying? What is the percentage of people who are actually buying clothes instead of brand new clothes thanks to Vinted and so on? And then you have the assumptions of the team of stakeholders working on the model. So that's how you use it. And it's really a tool for reflection, but it's definitely not a tool for prediction. That's more the way you use it.
Gael Duez (40:51)Okay. You know what? There are so many things that I would like to unpack with what you say that actually I think I'm going to pause for a moment on this modeling things. And I think we will do a double episode if you don't mind. because I would love to ask you several questions regarding the limit to modeling and it's not every day that I have an academic on the show. So discussing a bit scientific methodology, see a lot of interesting angles here with this specific use case and even playing with model and what is systems but I would say to close our focus on the vintage use case, I would love actually to zoom out quite seriously and not talking about avoided emission of a specific company. But truly zooming out and talking about digital technology and the entire digital sector or IT sector. There are a lot of discussions about the assessment of the footprint and the handprint of digital technologies that goes way beyond the micro level, which you illustrated with the vintage use case. And maybe to quote a big name here, I'm a big fan of Gautier Roussille's job. And he wrote several articles on the… avoided greenhouse gas emissions thanks to digitalization, challenging the conventional assumption that ⁓ digitization is by default good for the environment. We hear this a lot, like the need for a twin transition or transformation with the digital working hand in hand with the ecological transition. I know that it's really going from micro level to macro level, but did you make some connections also between what you found in your research paper and his findings? And is this question even relevant or there are two different words and we shouldn't mix them?
Laetitia Bornes (42:52)Yes, that's absolutely relevant. In fact, I totally agree with this criticism of the twin transition narrative, which seems to argue that digital technology will enable the ecological transition and which suggests that this is the case whatever the context. So the first problem that I see is that it seems to suggest somehow that since digital technologies will enable the ecological transition, we don't need to deeply rethink our lifestyles. And what's more, it seems suggested also that it doesn't matter if the direct impacts of digital technologies are increasing since they are offset by its indirect effects. So through the decarbonization of other sectors like transport, agriculture, construction and so on. first of all, there's nothing to prove that this is true in any case, not even close. And for this, I invite you to read the ADEM report, environmental assessment of the direct and indirect effects of digital technology on use cases. So it's a French reference, but it has been translated to English. And additionally, even when certain digital technologies actually help to reduce carbon emissions, they also lead to other impacts intensification of resource extraction and pollution. And on the top of that, the negative indirect effects of digital technologies. So in particular, the rebound effects we were talking about are often underestimated or completely ignored in the calculation, especially those that cannot be quantified as I mentioned. Of course, doesn't mean that digital technologies aren't necessarily bad either, obviously, but I think that the concept of Twitter transition is a bit techno-optimistic and a bit misleading. So in my opinion, we need to be much more cautious and nuanced. And that's exactly what the vintage case study and our study shows, in fact. So think there is a wrong thing with this narrative and focusing on each micro case won't results in a coherent transition. We have to plan it.
Gaël Duez (45:31)This is the end of the first part of this long episode with Laetitia Borne. In the second part, we will deep dive more on the theoretical aspect of model and systems thinking with a lot of insights and a lot of resources that she has happily shared with us. So stay tuned. Episode will be released next week.

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Description
“It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering.”
Some down-to-earth facts and analysis were coined by Pr PS Lee, one of the world's top experts in liquid cooling - and Pr. Heng Wang - a renowned expert in digital governance - while cross-analysing Singapore’s main challenges from an infrastructure and governance perspective of the ongoing AI Boom. 
Among the topics covered in this discussion with Gael Duez were: 

• The lack of standards and the need for holistic approaches
• Our imperfect, incomplete and unpredictable knowledge on AI
• The fit for purpose approach with the right mix of cooling solution
• Dealing with legacy datacenter infrastructure
• The moratorium on new data center and the other tools used by the Singapore government to cap energy consumption
• The carrot and stick approach to manage the environmental impacts

 And much more!
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Learn more about our guest and connect: 

• Pr. Poh Seng Lee's LinkedIn
• Pr. Heng Wang's LinkedIn
• Green IO website 
• Green IO Slack
• Gaël Duez's website 
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Pr. Lee and Pr. Wang's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• 𝘈𝘥𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘎𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘋𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘚𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺
• American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers
• Open Compute Project
• Singapore Green Data Center Roadmap
  
  

Transcript (auto-generated)
Prof PS Lee (00:01)It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering. I think for high-power AI workloads, then think going with liquid cooling, I think it's almost becoming the standard solution. But then not to forget, you also have storage, you have networking equipment. So these are actually typically the lower power,
Gaël Duez (00:24)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. One last thing. This episode is a bit special because it was recorded live from Green IO Singapore two weeks ago. The sound quality isn't as good as you have been used to, but the quality of the guests is as good as ever. Enjoy the episode.
Gael Duez (01:33)We’re live and we're doing this fire chat session at Green IO Singapore, second edition, and we're trying something new, which is recording live with all the technical hiccups that happened for the last 20 minutes. So my dear listeners, you didn't experience them, but the participants, did. And I'm delighted to be joined today by Professor P.S. Lee and Professor Heng Wang to discuss the environmental footprint of AI, but from a very hands-on perspective based on the city-state of Singapore, because both of them are experts, Professor PS Lee from an infrastructure perspective, Professor Heng from a governance perspective. So how does this rise in energy consumption, resource consumption caused by the AI boom is concretely impacting the infrastructure of Singapore and the way Singapore governs its digitalization. Without further notice, I would love to leave the ground to Professor Heng Wang. Can you briefly introduce yourself?
Pr PS Lee (02:34)First, thanks for having me. I'm Poh Seng or PS Lee from both Energy Studies Institute as well as Mechanical Engineering from the National University of Singapore. So my personal research centers around data center liquid cooling. So I've been working on this for past three to five years. Liquid cooling is not new but associated with the demand for AI now becomes almost as a part of requirement in order to sort of unleash the AI performance. But I more importantly is that the switch from conventional air cooling to liquid cooling, it can actually result in very significant energy savings as well as carbon footprint reduction. So think that to me is actually the more important question, how do we actually take advantage of various technologies to manage the carbon footprint of the industry so that we can allow the growth in the most sustainable fashion. 
Gael Duez (03:30)Okay, thanks a lot. Professor Wang. 
Prof Heng Wang (03:38)Thank you for having me here. Singapore Management University, Newport House School of Law. Before that I was a professor at the University of South Wales in Sydney. I work on the governance of digitalisation and sustainability. So the issue is about how do we align digitalisation with sustainability and one of the core issues about how do we navigate through the uncertainties because we are not necessarily have all the knowledge about that. How do we use the regulation governance, different tools to align the two together. And also I contribute to World Economic Forum, governance alliance from the perspective of responsible users. 
Gaël Duez (04:10)Quite a lot to deal with. So without further notice, let's jump right into the main question. What is according to both of you the main issues, the main pitfalls with this current AI boom in your fields of expertise?
Prof PS Lee (04:34)I think for the infrastructure side, the industry has been operating air-based systems for the longest time, the past three, four decades. So while liquid cooling is not new, think in general the industry does not actually have a lot of practitioners that are familiar with the design as well as the operations of liquid cooling infrastructure.
So I think there will be a period whereby there's quite a bit of learning as well as training that's actually necessary so that we actually equip the industry practitioner with the necessary know-how as well as tools to solve design and operate the liquid cooling infrastructure. Then obviously one of the natural questions is actually what about the CAPEX indication? We also gained the switching from liquid cooling to air cooling the demand while it's picking up is certainly not at the same volume as airbase is now. So that's why it's still the perceived delta in terms of the CAPEX Then I think even the more challenging is actually existing infrastructure. How do we actually allow wind retrofit of your existing data centers in a cost-effective fashion. So I think these are some of the issues.
the other is actually standards. think currently there is a lack of standards while there have been various guidelines, for example from ASHRAE, from OCP. But think there isn't a very well established standard when it comes to the new AI infrastructure. So I think it really needs to be a power-tracking of both the technical, the technology development as well as the governance including the standards.
Pr. Heng Wang (06:20)I think I agree what you have said, standard is one issue. From governance perspective, or from knowledge perspective, I think we have a number of major issue. First, about knowledge. So if you use AI, AI is fast developing. have an issue about we have imperfect knowledge about AI, it's kind of beta version. And secondly, we do not have complete knowledge.
because you you mentioned about cooling, mentioned about energy transition, know, e-waste, and different context, finance and other sectors, so you have silos. You knowledge are not really distributed as much as we want. Certainly also, it's also been an issue about unpredictability, so the social response to AI is an issue. If you think about AI will compete with your drinking water, the feedback to that will be different. So that's the knowledge side.
imperfect knowledge, incomplete knowledge and unpredictability. From governance perspective, we have mismatches. Mismatches about one is if you look at horizontally, your short-term and long-term consideration. Short-term you want to roll out fast. You also have a bottom-up decision. You have the use cases long-term, you have a susceptibility. And also you look at the governance levels. have domestic ones, sub-national ones, to regional ones, to international ones, which has been pretty tricky nowadays.
And also if you look at the issue of the silo solution earlier, you also have to break that. So that's come back to the issue, how do we build the knowledge? And how do we engage with stakeholders at different levels and to forge the standards and also to evolve over time?
Gael Duez (07:58)two questions to dive a bit on what you say. First of all, Professor Lee, it seems to me that you made the assumption that liquid cooling was the de facto solution to solve maybe partially the energy crisis caused by AI, but is it the only one? mean, if you take a step back and you position yourself as like an almighty father of Singapore, of Singapore's infrastructure, would you say, okay,
We need to go all in into liquid cooling, retrofit everything like this or is there different ways, different approaches that we should follow?
Pr PS Lee (08:38)It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering. I think for high-power AI workloads, then think going with liquid cooling, I think it's almost becoming the standard solution. But then not to forget, you also have storage, you have networking equipment. So these are actually typically the lower power, so you don't really mix to go to link cooling.
But even in AI, if you look at for example training versus inferencing, especially the later, inferencing you probably don't really require super high power chips. So in that regard, you can probably go with some of the air-based solutions, but maybe going from the conventional what we call the perimeter cooling involving crack-claw to a roll-based solution like in-roll coolers or rear door exchanger, which allows you to cool higher airflow rate.
such an AI influencing hardware. So I think it's always a case of fit for purpose.
Gael Duez (09:41)And in the case of, just for the listeners who are not super familiar with the wording, AB is air based cooling So, for a city like Singapore, did you manage to estimate the share of the current infrastructure that should be sort of retrofit toward liquid cooling and the share that should go as it is today?
Pr PS Lee (10:04)I think Singapore is actually quite unique because we have a moratorium about three years ago because back then, data center industry is consuming 7 % of electricity, obviously it's 7 % so it's actually huge. The government actually has its net zero commitment and obviously it's also concerned about the energy demand so that's why a moratorium was actually put in place which was actually finally lifted.
Thereafter, actually have a data center called for applications. But if you look at the licenses that were actually awarded, they are just averaging about 20 million. So I think for a mature data center market like Singapore, the reality or the fact is you have a bigger stock of existing data centers. Or you can call it legacy or ground-fuel data center. So I think the solutions that we should be looking at, whether or not you do liquid cooling or more efficient air-based solutions.
will be quite different compared to example Malaysia in particular, Johor Bahru because there's a lot of new data centers that are coming online. So for them, I suppose right from day one, they can actually start by designing or incorporating the coolant into the infrastructure. But for a merchant market like Singapore, I think likely we'll have to do it in phases.
without undue interruptions to ongoing operations, as well as undue delta in terms of the CAPEX But I feel that for mature data center markets like Singapore, the green retrofit data center, in fact, will be a lot more needle moving in terms of bringing down the carbon footprint compared to emerging markets like Malaysia.
Gael Duez (11:53)That's interesting the connection with the governance issue when you mentioned the moratorium that happened three years ago. mean, what is today in your view, Professor Wang, the balance you mentioned like short term, long term, how do you believe that Singapore would position itself in this fast rhythm regarding AI adoption and even like investment in new infrastructure, retrofitting infrastructure and like
Pr. Heng Wang (12:21)That is a great question. It involves the issue about understanding the costs and benefits. So you have to actually, it's a trade-off, which is a very difficult one. So I think it's very important to understand the risks, to build the knowledge It's only in this way you can make the informed decision. So that would be very important for the government's arrangements to understand what's happening, what's likely to happen. And you need foresight.
AI now is a landscape, move much faster. Like if you think of a highway in the past, you have 100 kilometers or 200 kilometers. Now it's 1,000, 20,000 depends on the speed of the development. So I think the first important step is actually we have to build a network of the stakeholders to understand risks and also the short-term and long-term considerations of that.
specifically you probably need to take more concrete measures like the Carrot and stick to launch towards that. So for example, for understanding risks, whether you want to encourage disclosure, disclosure of CO2 emissions, water consumption, so e-waste and other things, or you want to...
efficient labeling as we have done before you you utilize the adaptive existing tool for that or index or verification there could be also be industry use case for verification it's not only about the cost of money you can make money in a sense of it you can be as an ethical leader in that regard and those kind of things or you want to think of a monitoring forecast and also the early warning for example
I looking at thinking also being, it's also about the technology side, which I looked at earlier, is that whether it's also useful to train the AI models with those kind of training principles. So in this way, actually even if you use a prompt answer to the prompts, bearing in mind those kind of issues. And also you should like, whether you're thinking of what something you can do now, like the tendering offering requirements. So if have a project, and you're
for energy efficiency, so you have raised to top instead of raised to bottom. So there are other things you can do. You think about whether regulate AOMs and others. So I think a coherent approach and engage with different stakeholders and use different tools will be very important to make that happen.
Gael Duez (14:50)And if I can wrap up what you said, it's all about gathering the different stakeholders and using a mix of carrot and sticks. Could you maybe provide one or two examples of each in Singapore? Did the Singapore authority, maybe government, maybe governmental bodies, started to use the stick? I mean, they used a pretty big stick when they forbidden any new data center facilities three years ago.
but it has been lifted now. But what sort of sticks do you from the Singapore government, and what sort of carrots?
Pr. Heng Wang (15:27)I think that's actually as mentioned, you mentioned example the government may take measures about the developments of new data center, that's one example as you mentioned. But also that Singapore has a green data center roadmap. That's also been a way where they're trying to promote water and energy efficiency because actually if you have energy consumption over a certain threshold, then you are expected to have those kind of monitoring or the water usage of that.
think that's maybe probably more things to be done because this is a very new area. that's the reason why, mentioned earlier, that you can't think of adapting existing tools for that. Instead, everything starts from scratch. So that's the issue about when you talk about carrot and stick, energy and that going as mentioned earlier will be one way where you can give a reward because consumers will know what it means. Or for large energy models, you never requirement things, taming what are the energy consumption of that. So consumers may choose which energy actually more environmentally friendly. So what I try to make is that actually we have to think creatively and adapt to that. But not necessarily everything will be able to do that. One example is environment impact assessment. This is a tool which is difficult to apply because it's, you know...
So I just want to say that you have to adapt and risk one, but also think about developing new ones.
Gael Duez (16:51)I think the Singapore green data center roadmap was mentioned earlier today by the IMDA representative Dr. Lawrence Wee But it has been something that has been existing prior to the AI boom. Is it correct?
Pr PS Lee (17:09)There was an earlier version, I think they called it the Green Data Center Research Roadmap. So I think even back then, I think they mentioned things like liquid cooling, but I think the latest version which was actually launched last year is really about pushing for accelerated adoption of various solutions. I think like what Prof. mentioned, it really has to be done holistically. It's not just...
one singular solution like liquid cooling. You also need to look at the details right, are you still end up rejecting the heat, are you still end up consuming a lot of water operating the wet cooling towels. So I think the Green Data Center roadmap the latest edition I think it actually sort of put up a holistic kind of framework right, so that operators as well as their so-called partners, vendors, equipment vendors.
consultant can really adopt a holistic mindset in terms of looking at different aspects all the way from the procurement of your energy sources to the adoption of some of the latest energy-efficient solutions including liquid cooling to possibly recovering waste and actually putting it to productive end-use. So I see that as a progression.
But I think for me the next step in my view is really to come up with a holistic green or sustainable data center standard. I think we have different pieces, including I think one of the new standards that me together with my colleagues among the audience that's developing essentially on the liquid cooling standard. But I think it's more than just liquid cooling. So I think really I look forward to Singapore showing the leadership to establish a holistic standard for green or sustainable data.
Gael Duez (19:05)And just from our understanding, the roadmap as it is today, it's a set of best practices and things like that, but there is nothing compulsory at the moment. There is nothing sort of related to what the European Union did with the energy efficiency directive. But now, if you're above a certain power capacity for your data center, you need to waste heat as you mentioned, share of energy renewable. This sort of reporting, is it already in place in Singapore or not yet?
Pr PS Lee (19:38)what it would extend that the EU is doing but I think what we can see is actually IMDA and EDB is actually tying for example the PCCF8 to for example the green data center roadmap as well as the green mark for data center 3G green and 4 version so I think it still serves the purpose of actually really compelling the industry to sort of be very intentional as well as be very the
holistic in terms of assessing the different aspects that would actually lead to the more sustainable operation of the data centers.
Gael Duez (20:14)And maybe to close this fire chat, can we reverse the question? What do you see both of you as the greatest opportunity leveraging AI for sustained purpose in Singapore?
Pr. Heng Wang (20:30)Yeah, I just been seeing a lot of new ways that AI provides the possible way to do with that. So something I'm thinking of, you know, can use AI to simulate. So if you different governance or regulator arrangements, you could have agents. And then you can think about using AI to simulate what an outcome of that would be. So that probably will inform your decisions, you know, and also bring the different positions of actors into that.
And of course, AI will be used in the allocation of the energy resources and even allocation of the human resources for free energy generation, so on and so forth. So many ways that we need to explore.
Gael Duez (21:10)And just a side question because I didn't mention it in the introduction but you're an expert in blockchain techniques, not necessarily cryptocurrency but blockchain use. Do you see any related use between the AI boom which is a machine learning boom, now let's be honest, it's just a marketing trick to name it AI, and blockchain today or for you are there still two separate topics?
Pr. Heng Wang (21:36)Yeah, I'm not sure about blockchain technology expert, but I think that actually blockchain will be one way that nowadays we're thinking of synergize or work with the AI. So people even in the area like finance, example, or FinTech areas also looking to the AI's more important use of that, including how do you leverage technologies to do the compliance, regulatory compliance, for example, if you have an environmental.
regular requirements, whether we can use blockchain and other tools to make that happen, and AI to assist that process. So that's also been a possible way that we try to explore. But we have to see what are the rules by that. So for example, people may say we want regulation by design. So we require you to have the designer to build into your green stability in your AI or similar arrangements to make sure you comply with the requirements.
Pr PS Lee (22:27)Pr Wang already mentioned that can obviously leverage on AI for the simulating performance, can use it for optimizing the operations of the data centers. But I think the other aspect which I think really the AI can be sort of leveraged on is actually to orchestrate your computing, your power and cooling. Currently it's done in silos
But if you are able to time the workload to match with the availability of green electrons, then obviously you can actually better reduce the operational carbon. So see AI has a lot of potential in various aspects. In fact, can even leverage on AI for the entire life cycle of the data center, all the way from design, operation to end of life.
Gael Duez (23:15)Thanks a lot, of you. That was the first time we record live a podcast. I hope that, I mean, the sound obviously would not be studio quality sound, but I hope it will be understandable. Thanks a lot to the audience for attending. It was a great exercise. And yes, let's meet next year.
Pr PS Lee (23:32)Thank you.
Gaël Duez (23:36)Thank you for listening to this live episode from Green IO Singapore. Don't forget to share it on social media or directly with other data center practitioners. Our next episode will not be about the AI energy score. We had to postpone its recording, but with Letitia Bornes to talk about the avoided carbon emissions thanks to digital technologies. It will be based on a study she co- authored about Vinted, the massive second-hand platform. Stay tuned.
By the way, we decided to open our Slack workspace to our listeners willing to get involved in the making and the promotion of the GreenIo Podcast and its newsletter. The link in the show notes and you're more than welcome to join. One last thing, visit greenio.tech to check our next conferences. New York is in two weeks. The lineup is a blast. And as usual, you can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP Just make sure to have one before the 10 remaining
tickets are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you fellow responsible technologists build a greener digital world.



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A year ago, Building Green Software was released by O’Reilly. Since Tim Frick’s book “Designing for sustainability” (8 years ago!), O’Reilly didn’t publish anything fully focusing on sustainability. So, it’s a fair statement that this book was long awaited. 
But a year is an eternity in IT. This is why Sarah Hsu, one of its 3 co-authors as well as the chair of the Green Software Foundation’s Principles of Green Software committee, joined the show to talk about the trends she witnesses first hand in the green software engineering field and how she would envision a v2. More specifically she talked about: 

   🌟 GreenOps being the new kid in the block
   👨‍🏫 What FinOps can teach to GreenOps
   📈 How SRE can help treating environmental metrics like any other business metrics
   🕵️‍♀️ The hard truth about the four nine 
   📏 Progress made in measurement
   🔬 What the Rumsfeld’s Metrics can tell us about the difference between monitoring and observability
   🚧 Why it should always be space and time for deviation
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• Gaël Duez's website 
  
  

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Sarah's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• Building Green Software (O’Reilly)
• Green Software Foundation and the Green Software Foundation Patterns
• Sarah's Qcon London talk
• Sarah's talk at CamundaCon
• CNCF Kepler project
• Software Carbon Intensity standard
• Google SRE book
• Honeycomb’s O’Reilly Book Observability Engineering
• Extending the OpenTelemetry Java Auto-Instrumentation Agent to Publish Green Software Metrics
• Climate Product Management Playbook
  
  

Transcript (auto-generated)Sarah (00:01)
I'm a strong believer that we, Software Practitioner, should follow suit with what SRE are already doing. We have to treat the environmental metric like any other monitoring metric and use it to drive critical business decisions.

Gaël 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 bite 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 favourite podcast platform and, of course, on our website greenio.tech.

A year ago, Building Green Software was released by O'Reilly. Since Tim Frick's book, Designing for Sustainability, eight years ago, O'Reilly didn't publish anything fully focusing on sustainability. So it's a fair statement that this book was long awaited.

And watching the line during the book signing at Green IO London last year, I guess its launch was a success. But a year is an eternity in IT. This is why I'm delighted to have the last of the Building Green Software's co-authores, who didn't join the show yet, to be with me today, Sarah Hsu, to talk about the trends she witnesses firsthand in the green software engineering field. Based in London, Sarah is a pillar of the Green Software Foundation where she chairs the Principles of Green Software Engineering institution as Site Reliability Engineer. And on top of being an author, she's also a regular speaker at Kubernetes Community Day, LeanAgile and GreenIO conferences. Welcome to GreenIO, Sarah. And first of all, congrats for your Tech Woman 100 Award last year. How does it feel?

Sarah (02:21)
Hi, Gaël I'm so excited to be here. I love, welcome to Green IO spill. You say that all the time. I feel like sometimes I can hear it in my sleep, you know.

Gaël Duez (02:34)
Excellent.

Sarah (02:35)
But anyway, yeah, thank you for asking about the award. Winning it, it did feel great. And while it's fantastic to have my own hard work recognized, and it really is a celebration for everyone who has been part of my journey. It honors the dedication of my incredible teams, my work team, my GSF team, and of course, my book team and it's celebration of the success of all our project. And I guess personally, I think the most important thing that came out of this is that it's a massive, massive kudos to every single person who has invested their time and effort to support me along the way. And that includes you, Gaël things like we met two three years ago at the very, very inception of like green software and green IO.

Gaël Duez (03:30)
I wasn't expecting to be included in this amazing crowd that you gathered around you I'm a bit surprised, but happily surprised. Thanks a lot. And I have to say that it's great because this recognition, it really highlights that sustainability is a teamwork, but it also shed a very positive light on sustainably being a hot topic in the IT industry and I think we need all these positive signs, especially at the moment. So, congratulations again.

Sarah (04:06)
Thank you.

Gaël Duez (04:07)
And without further notice, the I don't know how million dollar question, but actually it could be a Gartner title for one of their study. According to you, what are the main trends that you see in green software since a year ago, since the release of your book?

Sarah (04:29)
Well, how much time do we have? I'm joking.

Gaël Duez (04:32)
Between two to three hours. No joking.

Sarah (04:35)
Hopefully we're not here that long. Well, the space, the green software space has exploded in the past couple of years. Like look at Green IO and the popularity and the engagement has just been amazing. So I guess the first and foremost trend I think is the people, right? The incredible people that we have all met in the past couple of years have been absolutely wonderful.

There really is a real sense of camaraderie. People are here all to learn from each other, to help each other. We are comparing nodes and most importantly, we're celebrating every single little wing within the space. And even though the space really, really has exploded in the past year, we're still in a critical stage of raising awareness among the wider software community. And personally for me, my keynote at Ling Agile, Eddinger Conference last year is one of those moments I probably would never forget. The energy of the crowd that day, it was just incredible. And how appreciative people were of my talk and my time. It really made all those late night and weekend sacrifice worthwhile. So yeah, I think that's the first trend. And it's not strictly technical, but still so important to highlight and hopefully serve as an encouragement to all our listeners out there. We should keep it going. We've got to continue this broken radio energy in every single direction we can to make green software. Not the afterthought, but the first thing everyone discuss in any technical meetings.

Gaël Duez (06:20)
And I do agree that I can feel this energy and growing concern and the growing commitment of many responsible technologists, would say, whether they work in design, ops, cloud, you know, obviously software development, et cetera, et cetera. Do you have any other trends on top of this people trend, I would say, then don't worry, I've got plenty of much more technical questions.

Sarah (06:47)
Okay. Yeah. So the second trend, I guess I want to mention is the realization that green software really is not an ivory tower. We're not asking the overstretched engineering team to work on something completely new. The way we see green software is that it integrates seamlessly with software engineering practices. And it really isn't here to disrupt your established workflows. And I guess that nicely leads me to my next trend, GreenOps. I know I feel like we need to make a catchy tune for GreenOps. So yeah, Gaël, maybe that's something you can help us out since green IO opening is so catchy. But GreenOps is getting very catchy and it is the most trendy kid on the block right now. And just so everyone is clear, when we talk about GreenOps, we mean green DevOps, not the fossils. But yeah, guess green DevOps is here to rule us all. So I would say that is the third trend that I've seen for the past year.

Gaël Duez (07:58)
So I would say to wrap it up, first trend, people, large awareness raising movement amongst people working in our Second trend will be, we're not in an ivory tower and we need to connect to every other specialties building amazing software to make it work. third is definitely green DevOps, be more precise. On this one, actually I have a question. Is it a leader or is it a follower of the FinOps movement? And by that I mean that we talked a lot about the mutual reinforcement of GreenOps and FinOps especially for all the tech stack based on cloud and especially public cloud services.

Do you see this reinforcement happening and do you believe that the rise in GreenDevOps has been mostly fueled by the rise in FinOps or are they two separate movements enjoying mutual co-benefits?

Sarah (08:56)
Again, I'm saying in on behalf of myself, I personally think GreenOps extends really naturally from DevOps and FinOps. And I think GreenOps is, can stand on its own weight, but FinOps is just a lot more mature in the space and it's already had amazing framework and not a lot of thought process going out against it. So yeah, I personally think FinOps and GreenOps. They are basically just two sides of the same point and they have the same goal, right? Which is optimization. and I believe that we, we're soft engineers, right? We are inherently lazy people. So why would we want to reinvent the wheels? Why will we not incorporate try and tested practices that the FinOps people has already done for us to achieve this optimization utopia? If you know what I mean. So yeah, I know there are some really strong arguments against using cost as proxy for estimating software's carbon emission. And I tend to agree. However, we really should not overlook the important lessons that FinOps is trying to teach us. Firstly, it's all about accountability, Sustainability is no longer just an ethical headache.

It's every single person's responsibility, from the finance people to legal to operations to HR and of course to us engineers. We all really need to play our part the second point in my opinion is all about transparency. We need that transparency to empower everyone. If the legal guy who sits two rows behind us can't feel that sense of accomplishment, why would there be an incentive to take part, right? And lastly, I think the most important point that FinOps already outlined for us is the knockoff benefits or as we would like to call it in the book, co-benefits.

One of the messages we really, really want to get out there with the book is the core benefits of green software. So yeah, similar to FinOps, achieving cost optimization has loads and loads of knock-on benefits.

Gaël Duez (11:10)
That's very clear. mean, there are technical debates. You mentioned one that cost is not the best proxy for carbon emission, water consumption, etc. I would say that at the beginning of the journey, usually their best friends at some point, they might diverge a bit. That being said, You said you see a very strong trend in the GreenOps movements. Is it more on awareness or do you already see tools and patterns? You mentioned that FinOps is much more mature when it comes to framework and tooling, et cetera, et cetera. Do you see some no brainer techniques or patterns or frameworks being adopted in the GreenOps movement or are we still in a would say searching and exploration mode.

Sarah (12:01)
I think, yes, a lot of the things are already being adopted in the grown-up space, but people just don't realize they're already doing it, if that makes sense. I'll give you an example, right, like automation. Like automation has been everyone's best sidekick for people from SREs to devops to engineers to testers, automation is there to allow us to continue to the bandwidth to innovate, to work on exciting business problems, right? And automation is not just a way to achieve in DevOps. Automation also have loads of other co-benefits when you think about it through the GreenOps perspective.

Gaël Duez (12:50)
I would say that I see these adoptions and especially in automation, getting a lot of interest. I'm still concerned about the gap between willingness and action. Which leads me to this very related question. In the chapter on operational efficiency, was it monitoring? I don't remember, but that's okay. You mentioned that reliability engineer and sustainably advocate should be best friends. And Wilco, who's a regular listener of the show and I were discussing about it. And his question was a very pragmatic question that he wanted to ask you. Where are sustainable site reliability operational practices hitting a roadblock? And what should be the key focus to drive them forward in 2025?

Sarah (13:40)
Right, so I guess the biggest roadblock, not just for SRE or sustainable advocates or anyone really, is the measurement piece. We really can't improve what we can't measure. I guess speaking as an SRE, we really, really need that standardized real-time metric across the board. We SREs have like perfected production monitoring in the last 10 years. So if the sustainable people really have this metric ready for SREs, we can then just throw this metric over the fence and have them start treating it like one of the golden signals. the four golden signals of production and monitoring, or as I would like to call them similarly in the book. the fore horseman of matrix based monitoring, a latency traffic error and saturation. So, so yeah, what that means is that we SREs use them alone with the concepts of SLO and SLI, service level objectives and service level indicators to serve our clients. And I'm hoping, I'm really hoping that everyone who's in the software business can agree with me that everything we do, really everything we do comes down to our clients, right?

It really is measuring, but we really shouldn't be inventing the world of how we should treat this real time metric. We really should be using the concepts of SLOs and SLIs and aeroboject to drive the actual needs of what our client wants. Right? For example, I can go on and on and on. Sorry.

Gaël Duez (15:05)
But I'd love to listen to your example.

Sarah (15:25)
Okay, so for example, if any of those fancy new feature we talked about is going to disrupt one of SLOs, then why are we really even pushing out the new features? We should be looking at how to stay true to our promises to our clients based on the service level agreements and service level objective that we have established already with them. And moreover, if for the past months we have had many late night incidents, should we really be pushing out new features? Shouldn't we be focusing on fixing the reliability and the resilience of our website? Again, using the concepts of SLO and our project to make business decisions. And sometimes I think engineers. Forget the enormous complexity that comes with supporting a four nine services. And if you really want to strive for a four nine services, and in this context of four nine of availability, I means a system being operationally available 99.99 of the time, which means that a maximum of 52.56 minutes of downtime per year. And what that means, per month is you only get to have 4.38 minutes of downtime per month. And downtime here, what we mean is we don't just mean the time we might have spent solving an incident, but also any time when the system is not working. For example, some people might have CI-CD set up to do automated upgrade security patches, or they are not allowed to do continuous rollout, so they need to have rollout schedules so yeah, I am really, really, I'm a strong believer that we, Software Practitioner, should follow suit with what SRE are already doing. We have to treat the environmental metric like any other monitoring metric and use it to drive critical business decisions. Why are we pushing our new feature? It's just going to massively drive up our product's rate of carbon emission, right? So yeah, I really should stop, otherwise I can go on and on and on. But really long story short, believe, site reliability engineering principles are pretty sustainable already as lay out a set of disciplines that keep us honest in delivering what our clients truly want.

Gaël Duez (17:47)
It's just that. Let me think a bit. I think it's really, really enlightening the parallel that you make. And that's for sure that with the SRE framework and all this tool, the SLI, the SLO, could even go to the SLA, et  et we could copy past sort of this methodology or incorporate within it the environmental impact metrics. What I see two pitfalls at the moment is the first one. There is no such direct business consequences of not respecting an SLO when it comes to environmental impacts, at least until now and until we have got some serious regulations regarding carbon emissions or other environmental impacts, which are unfortunately not happening that much at the moment. Now, it could still be the case if there are some very strong internal commitment or if some company had very committed stakeholders requiring to meet a certain carbon budget, a certain water budget, etc. But my point is for the general company, the feedback loop is not as strong when we discuss environmental impacts than when we discuss reliability, site reliability impacts. That will be my comment number one. And please feel free to comment. What I would just add also on top of it is that, and you're going to hate me for this, do we always need 99.99 % of reliability to sell vegetables? If a simple cohort analysis will show that 99.99 % of our customers are sleeping because we are very focused on a single area for eight hours a day and they never visit a website. And I'm a bit provocative here, but I see your point. also see that sustainable leach should also help challenging what should be our SLO. And the dogma that I've been following thoroughly when I was CTO, like 99.99%. And I remember these dashboards and I remember this hard discussion with product managers wanting to push new features, et cetera. So it's really ringing a bell, 100 % resonating with my past experiences, what you've described. However, if I were to be in the same reading room today, I think I will challenge much more the SLO and maybe make it a bit more subtile, sorry for this poor use of word, by agreeing that SLO should be adjusted for time for certain categories of customers, because that will also dramatically help to reduce the system footprint. So that will be my comment number one and my comment number two. And feel free to disagree entirely with these two comments.

Sarah (20:41)
Okay. So the, so the first comment is that, because there's no strong sense to come to, be compliant with the SLOs that people set out for the green software metric or something that people will not be as willing to like uphold what promises they've made. Is that, I getting that correctly?

Gaël Duez (21:06)
Absolutely, absolutely.

Sarah (21:07)
Yeah, you know what, like… I think sometimes SRE principles are more than just a technical set of problems that we're trying to solve. They are more of a cultural problem as well. And it really is trying to solve cultural problem between teams, how to get teams to work together, how to get everyone to understand that reliability of a system is our one true goal, right?

That is not just so for self-ingenious who are just pushing our features, they need to understand how difficult is it to support their own features, right? So I think SRE is a great set of disciplines, but people sometimes forgot to look at the other side, which is a massive cultural problem, right? Like having people to buy in on this of principle is not that easy.

Sarah (22:00)
And I think that can be said about having people to buying on green software slightly as well. But I just think it's so important to put a message out there that we are ready to treat this important metric as one of the signals that SRC already tracking. And we already have this framework of SLO census lie and error budget to really consider how reliable and how reliable not even just in the sense of availability and resilience, but how reliable we are with the promise to our clients of how much carbon our thing should be emitting. So I think it's a lot easier to say than done. And when we talk about SRE, a lot of the time people forgot the culture side of the clash people have when they start bringing SRE principles. So yeah, I do agree with what you just said. It's really hard for people to stay compliant without the regulations. But the message we want to get out there from the book is that there is this framework. It's being tried and tested. It's working. And we should now reinvent. I think that's the message. And then I think for the second question, right, is about the wheel.

Like you want a full night services, but just for the eight hours that your customers are maybe awake. But I think that's not how availability work because availability is soft, like average for months. So for example, like you, you are building an internal web app and, and then the, the, the user of those internal web app lives in, I don't know, in Singapore, right?

Do you really need those web app running when those people has come home? And then you would take the average of all availability, not just the eight hours they're working, but then the time they're not working. So I think that just means you really are not aiming for four nine services. is, I really feel like people use four nine as a badge of honor to say, hey, my service for nine is so complex we really shouldn't be using four nights as a badge of honor. Like you really need to figure out exactly what's needed for your clients, not like what you want to do, right? Similar to like the whole embodied carbon argument, people...

Gaël Duez (24:27)
Absolutely.

Sarah (24:32)
Want to use the latest and greatest technology to build a mobile app. But do you really need that though? Like if you're just having, I don't know, like a news reading website, you don't need the latest chips or the latest technology to run that kind of app. So, so yeah, I think it's all about compromise and trade-offs and, and it is hard for engineers because it is a lot of fun to work on the latest stuff. Yeah.

Gaël Duez (24:56)
Absolutely. And it's part of the cultural game, I fully agree. Now, just going through all this very interesting straight of thoughts around SRE, implementing this SRE framework, tested and reliable, as you said, requires to be able to monitor and to monitor, there is also the question of to observe and observability. So my first question would be did you notice any significant improvements in monitoring the environmental impacts of the code in production? Because this monitoring is a prerequisite to implement all this SRE framework that you've mentioned before. And you touched upon this point earlier in the episode. So what are the trends regarding monitoring at the moment? And maybe you want to add observability. mean, answer it the way you want.

Sarah (25:51)
So yeah, I think we have made good progress, really, really good progress in this space. Even though, again, I already said, we still don't have that standardized real-time carbon metrics, right? Well, we are seeing more and more projects popping up around in the cloud-native space, in the Kubernetes space. Now we have Kepler, which use EBPF to work out the real-time power consumption for Kubernetes workload. You're probably thinking, yeah, but… Power consumption doesn't take into account the carbon intensity of the sources, right? So again, we are making progress, but not to where we want to be yet. But it's great to see those progress. And of course, I have to mention SCI right? We have now SCI being recognized as an ISO standard, not just universities are teaching about them, but a researcher team in Germany has now extended OpenTelemetry Java agent to generate SCI score automatically, which is really, really neat.

And yeah, so I think we have seen significant improvements in the space and the second sort of like the second tale of the questions about observability. So yeah, I guess like, again, I should spend the better half of an hour to talk about how great monitoring is, but the world has now slowly moved on to observability. And so should we slightly? And right before we get too excited, let's take a step back and then let's discuss what is the difference between monitoring and observability. And to borrow the phrase, all you used earlier, this is a million dollar question that every SRE has been brewing over for the past couple of years. So yeah, it's very nerve wracking, but yeah.

Gaël Duez (27:48)
We're gonna get rich!

Sarah (27:53)
Anyway, hopefully I don't get it wrong trying to explain what the differences are. So as we all know, microservices architectures are our favorite frenemies. They have not just brought us incredible agility and speed to push out new features, new way for the team to work as a team to collaborate, but they've also made our system rather complicated. If anyone at home can look up something called the Romsfield Metrics, it's basically a framework not initially designed for software engineering or software operations, but a paradigm that has been broadly applied in different fields across various So the framework can help us get a better grip on our understanding of uncertainty and certainty when we are making decisions rise of four quadrants basically divided into like knowns, knowns, knowns, unknowns, unknowns, etc. So yeah, so traditional monitoring is really, really good at helping us figure out a set of problems, knowns and unknowns, which is quite mouthful, but I'll give you an example. If we have a monolithic application experiencing performance issue, we are probably know which hand of metrics that we need to instrument and monitor. And for example, it could be a CPU problem. And what that means is we then need to set up a plot of graph, maybe set up an alert, monitor the CPU usage of applications to make sure our system never become overwhelmed. And well, probably everyone can agree that the issue of an overwatt CPU is very well established problem that many people have already faced before. So generally speaking– It's a relatively painless bug to solve because CPU usage is a metric. We already know how to monitor and the problem itself is well-astooned. However, bugs can become very, very tricky really quickly as we move through the quadrants to problems that are known as unknowns and unknowns.

Think of it this way, right? If you're a mobile developer, and what kind of metrics and dashboard do you need to set up to detect an issue that only affects the Pixel 7a in Taiwan, right? And you as a mobile developer, you probably don't just support one generation of the phone, but you support the past five generations and maybe different flavor of Android phones as well, right? And Taiwan, it's just one small country. There are so many other countries that you have to support. So again, traditional monitoring does need a bit of spruce up as it's really, really hard to predict what could have gone wrong and where things might have gone wrong. And you guys know how much I love making analogies. My favorite analogy for debugging an unknown problem is to think of it as a murder mystery without any clues So yeah, what is observability?

Observability originated from something called the control theory. Specifically, we define it as a measure of how well the internal state of a software system can be understood from its external outputs. So the way we can think of it is that observability will not just help us identify that something has gone wrong, but where and why something has gone wrong. So in green software terms, we want all this. We want to be able to pinpoint exactly where in our system maybe is a process that has violated our green promises to our clients, right? And we don't also just want to know why, we want to know where and how so we can fix it.

So this emerging topic is again another set of like thinking and principles that serve as a really good exercise for us to start thinking about how exactly will we fit into the space, if that makes sense. And again, why are we reinventing the wheels?

Gaël Duez (31:55)
In me, again, as you say, and it makes me think that this is a big, rabbit hole and I really want to dive into it, but I cannot because you're not supposed to do too long podcast episode and because otherwise my boss wouldn't be happy, my shareholders wouldn't be happy, my advertising companies wouldn't be happy. But the good news is I don't care. I've got an answer of these. So let's ask the question. connecting when you mentioned observability and sustainability, it was really, really connecting two dots in my mind regarding the unknown and the unknown unknown, which is exactly the issue we've got with the carbon intensity of most of the electricity grid. I the question is not we want to monitor most of the time. If you look at electricity maps, and sorry, you can have the same with what time. I'm not advocating for one solution or the other. What strikes me all the time is how much unknown we've got. And even when you zoom in most of the time, it's in many, many countries, it's still country level So when we are trying to take decisions, with an SRE framework, for instance, as you mentioned, we are facing a lot of unknown. And you can even go further with the unknown of the embedded carbon, because with the supply chains today, it's really wild guess to assess what is a true amount of carbon or water or rare resources that are embedded in any piece of equipment. And every time that someone actually does it chemically, to reverse engineering the composition of an IT equipment, they discover new things which add the impacts. And I had beautiful examples recently where people were like, product carbon footprint is so far away from what we are experiencing in our lab. But anyway, sorry, I'm rambling. My turn to be too talkative. My point is, it's very, very interesting to embrace all of this. Observability approach because in the sustainability world, we know that we don't know that much. Now, my question, because there is a question, is do you believe that we sort of embrace fully this observability approach and onboard it within this SRE framework that you mentioned before? Or do you believe that because this is a nascent area, and sustainability, carbon awareness, water awareness, resource awareness are also nascent areas or topics. Adding the two of them will create way too much complexity and people will sort of reject it like it's not mature enough, come back in 10 years when things will be clearer, more structured, easier to use. That's a one million dollar question. Another one. We're going to get very rich at the end of this episode.

Sarah (34:59)
Haha. Why not? Again, I, don't know, speaking, speaking as someone who does write code every day in enterprise setting. what's really important for me as an engineer is that there, there definitely should be space and time for deviation, right? That you can't always be following like I know other people hate the word best practices but you can't always be following what someone at a completely different organization say the best practices is right. We need to allow time and space for people what best practices mean for them in their context and I agree that while everything is very convoluted there's too many unknowns, unknowns not just in necessary world in the observability space, we figuring out what's going on with our systems. But like, again, you were saying like, the carbon awareness, water awareness and all that. But it's just so important that we just keep tap on each other. Right? Because I personally don't see observability take a backseat. Like it's going to be how production systems are being run in the future. And then sustainability, I mean, we're on a podcast called Green IO is going to stay, right? So how do we make sure two disciplines that maybe things very, Orthogonal, orthogonal but move up at the same time, right? Like we should still be orthogonal, but we should not be more than orthogonal, if that makes sense. Like we just have to keep tap because it is two separate issues, but there's a lot of overlap and then synergy to share. But it's just important to know why two fields of engineering, these two fields of engineering will have to coexist in the near future. And it's time to make sure we keep tap on each other. Right. And hopefully, observability can influence how green self-engineering field evolved and vice versa. I don't know whether that's the answer you look for.

Gaël Duez (37:11)
I was not looking for any specific answer. I'm really enjoying the conversation. It might be a bit conceptual, but for whoever has coded I think it will ring some bell. Now you mentioned, and I want to have just a bit of time to talk about the book, but I've got one last question related to exactly what you mentioned right now, which is the Green Software Engineering principle. We had a discussion on the trends and the future tools and framework that should be used. I mentioned in introduction that you are actually the chair of the principles of Green Software Engineering Committee. Can you tell us, because we do love insider information, that we can trade yet for another million? So could you tell us more about the new area where you focusing and maybe some changes that you foresee in this principles?

Sarah (38:09)
Okay, I'll try to be short, sorry. I do just want to say that it's principle green software engine, just principle green software. anyway, so some of the area we're focusing on. I'm pretty sure you probably have heard about green software patterns. So Leah Matthew, who I work very closely with is now one of the coaches for the patterns. A loan was Francisco. And they're both amazing. I love working with them. Really great to see them thriving in Green Software Foundation. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, principles and patterns have always been a very tightly working group and where we meet very regularly to talk about principles and patterns. And principles, after we published version one, sort of come to like a natural end. We still answer to loads of questions. We now have loads of different translations to different languages. We have French, we have Dutch, we have Italian. I think we also have Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. It's absolutely incredible to see the commitment from not just GSF, but then the wider community on translating the principles, principles of So we're sort of like at the tail end of like where the project is for the moment, but now all our energy is on patterns. And I don't want to spend too much time talking about patterns. I'm hoping maybe like, Gaël, you can invite Leah and Francisco to talk about patterns when they reach like a natural milestone. But right now the main focus is about patterns. And you're probably thinking, you keep saying the word patterns, what is green software patterns? So patterns are set up of like vendor and tool agnostic best practices that people can do when they are trying to achieve green software principles.

So that's sort of how I see patterns. They are a set of best practices from a persona sort of view and how to achieve the three Holy Trinity's of Greens of Virginia, which is carbon efficiency, electricity efficiency and hardware efficiency and carbon aware. sort of was happening with principles and patterns.

Gaël Duez (40:00)
Hardware efficiency. A true focus on pattern. And fun fact, before you actually mentioned it, I was taking notes and the note was Leah plus second semester 2025. I guess. So you say. I guess that we are really aligned here that once the work is finalized enough, they will be more than welcome to be on the show. And that's crystal clear that you focus on pattern. Maybe it's time to leave or wrap it all. Honestly, I think I could spend another hour discussing with you, there are also… much smaller second part of this episode or at least a few questions I wanted to ask directly related to the book. So if you don't mind, we will move on and I'd like to ask you five questions, but I've got a very hard challenge for you. Are you ready to tackle it?

Sarah (41:11)
Yes, and I do think we shouldn't have the poor class too long. So I'll speak quicker and I'll shorten my answers. And if we think a question's not working out, let's just can it.

Gaël Duez (41:15)
Ha ha ha ha. So the challenge is one sentence answer. You can do it. So I don't have the options to put some music like, and I'm a terrible singer, so I won't do this. But a few questions I wanted to ask you about the book, because also brings valuable information about

Sarah (41:25)
Okay, wow. I can do it, I can do it.

Gaël Duez (41:49)
its reception and what it says about the current trend in green software. But my first question is, well, you the first feedback is commercial success. So can I ask you how many copies were sold or distributed?

Sarah (42:02)
So unfortunately, I actually don't know. But what I can tell you is that the book has now been translated into Spanish and it's in process of being translated to both simplified and traditional Chinese. So, know, sorry, mom, you still need to read my book.

Gaël Duez (42:20)
Well, that's usually a positive sign because you don't start translations if it's a flop.

Sarah (42:27)
Yes, and there's also, why is it called? An audio book version as well. Forgot to mention that.

Gaël Duez (42:34)
Okay, so if someone from O'Reilly listens to this episode, we would love to get the figures, especially if they're really good, but I know that they're not bad because I've seen the, you know, as I say, the line and people queuing up to get a book signing and yeah, a lot of traction around, but that was okay. That was me being very curious. My second question, which chapters are most suited for a version two? According to you and maybe your co-author if you started to discuss it.

Sarah (43:01)
We haven't, so this is from me and I apologize to Anand and Zara. But probably I would say again, monitoring chapter, because a lot has happened. We now have like real time EVPF way of getting power metric for Kubernetes workload. So there's a lot of interesting space to explore out there. And measurement, because it can definitely do a bit of sprues up. It's already a great chapter, but a lot has happened in this phase. And I guess again, GreenOps right? I think we got to do what FinOps are doing. We need to have the formalized principles and framework written down in a way that's like bite-sized. People can just use it. So I think that's probably the three chapters I think could really do with some spruce up if we're going to do a V2.

Gaël Duez (43:51)
Thanks lot for you, very direct and honest answer. And my last question will be, what's next?

Sarah (43:57)
I am going to make the same joke again. sorry, everyone who's already heard this joke. But what I'm doing next is I'm continue my tour as a rock star talking, signing and hopefully singing about all the good work Anne Sarah and I did for the book.

Gaël Duez (44:15)
Ha ha ha

Sarah (44:19)
So yeah, personally, I will be at QCon London early April on the sustainability track. And then I'm heading off to Devol XX in London in May. And most excitingly, hopefully go to in October in Copenhagen with Zara. This will be third time meeting Zara in real life. So it's very, very exciting. So yeah, that's probably what's next for me.

Gaël Duez (44:38)
Woohoo!

Sarah (44:47)
And yeah, I spent a little bit more time in the how to get SCI into the outer space is probably something I would like to do as well.

Gaël Duez (44:56)
Hmm. Yeah, got it. Congratulations for joining QCon And I must admit that I'm pretty proud because in QCon this year, QCon London, I will have, as far as I know already, two of my former guests speaking because Ludy Akue is also deliver talk about sustainability in IT. So I take it as a very positive sign and I'm very happy with it.

And among all this great news of you talking and being able to push the message and to raise it onto the asm among crazy crowds of fans yelling at you and sending flowers on stage.

Is there any positive piece of news that you'd like to share to close this episode?

Sarah (45:48)
I guess, I actually, don't know. I feel very being put on the spot, but I guess the most positive thing is that, I guess like a quick thank you. I know it's so cheesy. We have enough cheesiness already, but it is a good, a great thank you to every single person I've met in the past year to talk about Green Software to talk about the book and the energy, the synergy and like, and I think you said,

Gaël Duez (45:51)
You don't have to you don't have

Sarah (46:15)
Something, I can't remember exactly the word you said earlier, but what's so great about like, we know climate problems are hitting us hard in the face and the world is on fire. We're getting flooding every other day. But then the positive energy that everyone has to say, if we just get our ducks in a row, we can solve this problem. And that is my feeling that I got from everyone. And it's amazing. It's just amazing. And that's something. I think is a great news that I'm hoping we're hoping to encourage anyone right to get into the green software space. And yeah, it's one of the most amazing space you will feel so welcome. So so yeah, it's that does that count as a good news?

Gaël Duez (46:59)
very good news to close the episode. And once again, thanks a lot for joining. Thanks a lot for joining this episode. Thanks a lot for joining several Green IO conference. all the great work that you're doing looking forward to seeing you again later this year.

Sarah (47:14)
Thank you, No worries

Gaël Duez (47:16)
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 it's worth it. One single rating on a podcast platform equals 1000 likes on YouTube. Maybe this is why they made it a challenge to use, but I trust you to succeed. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with other software practitioners seems also good idea to provide them with inspiration on GreenOps, SRE, observability and the likes. You got the point, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to spread the word to more responsible technologists. 

In our next episode, I will welcome Boris Kamazayoshikov to debrief all the announcements made about sustainability at the Paris AI Action Summit, starting with the release of the AI Energy Score. Stay tuned. 

By the way, we decided to open our Slack workspace to our listeners willing to get involved in the making and the promotion of the Green IO Podcast and its newsletter. The link is in the show notes and you're more than welcome to join. And one last thing. Visit greenio.tech to check the next conferences we organize. Singapore is in one week and its full agenda is now available. New York is in one week and many speakers have been disclosed. As usual, you can get a free ticket to 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.
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Did containerisation ship away our environmental responsibility? 
Containers come with the promise of automation, scalability and reliability. The question is how to add sustainability to the list without breaking its other benefits. To talk about these challenges, Gaël Duez welcomes Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki, 2 experts in Kubernetes who are also pillars of the CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability workgroup. 
This episode might beat the record of acronyms: KEIT, CNCF, TAG … And yet Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki provided crystal clear explanations when they covered:    🍳 Why Kubernetes is a lot like a restaurant,    ⛈️ The challenges with sustainability in cloud computing,    🛠️ The CNCF KEIT project,    🌱 CNCF’s reorg and what might happen to the TAG Environmental Sustainability,    💪 The power of open source communities, And much more!

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Learn more about our guests and connect 

• Flavia’s LinkedIn
• Niki’s LinkedIn
• Green IO website 
• Green IO Slack
• Gaël Duez's website 
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Flavia and Niki's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• FOSDEM 2025 talk: Kubernetes Emissions Insights: Turning Cloud-Native Green (Without Recycling Pods)
• KubeCon 2024 talk: Debunking Myths About Environmental Sustainability in the Cloud, Building a Greener CNCF Landscape
• CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability
• CNCF Kepler project
• CNCF Prometheus
• CNCF Falco
• Software Carbon Intensity standard
• Boavizta API
• Aknostic
• GrafanaLabs

Transcript (auto-generated)
Flavia (00:00)I got to meet Nikki and all the people at the CNCF and I had the opportunity to go to KubeCon in Paris last year, it was amazing because it's not just about the who and the what, but it's about the people. So the energy that came out of that group, I like, want to be part of this. I want to, you know, join forces to build something together
Gaël Duez (00:16)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 bite 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 our website greenio.tech.
Cloud computing is nothing but material. It is just someone else's computer, as a popular quote says. Yet, using cloud services comes with its specific challenges for whoever is willing to seriously monitor its environmental footprint. And with the rapid adoption of cloud-based solutions, came extra layers of abstraction and remoteness with the bare-metal servers which ultimately compute and store the data.
One of these extra layers is the use of containers in the orchestration system. And they have been massively adopted in software engineering and cloud operation, the so-called DevOps. The software containers market is now a multi-billion US dollar industry with a double digit gross rate. Containers come with the promise of automation, scalability, and reliability.
Flavia (01:41)Thank you.
Gaël Duez (02:08)The question is how to add sustainability to the list without breaking its other benefits. To talk about these challenges, I'm glad to have two experts in Kubernetes, by far the most used container orchestration solution in the world.
Gaël Duez (02:24)Flavia and Niki who will be at CubeCon 2025 in London next week.
Gaël Duez (02:32)Flavia is CTO at Agnostic and a tech lead in the CNCF TAG Sustainability Screen Reviews Working Group. She has decades of experience in software engineering, and in her early days, she co-authored several O'Reilly books on AWS and also built an IoT platform She is originally from Argentina and now lives in Utrecht, Netherlands. Niki Manoledaki is a senior software engineer at Grafana Labs, where she's part of the platform engineering team but she is also an environmental sustainability advocate, keynote speaker and a community facilitator, starting with co-chairing the CNCF Environmental Sustainability Tags Green Reviews Working Group. She's based in Barcelona, Spain. And fun fact, reflecting the 2024 year for the Green IO Podcast, I was concerned by the lack of Spanish speaking guests in the lineup. And I've realized that in 2025, there are a majority so far. So I do hope that all this episode will help spark meaningful conversations, both in Spain and in Latin America. And at some point I will have to consider hosting a GreenOil conference in Barcelona, Or maybe in Amsterdam first.
Niki (03:48)Barcelona is a great place to host conferences. We do have the Mobile World Congress already happening. Actually, it's happening soon.
Gaël Duez (03:57)I also happens in...
Flavia (03:57)It would be nice when there's a train that goes from here to Barcelona, but they're still in progress.
Gaël Duez (04:05)I know. At least Paris is well connected by train, both from Barcelona, the Netherlands, UK, etc. So at least for Green IO Paris, it will be easy to join by train. That being said, hello, both of you.
Niki (04:19)Hello.
Flavia (04:19)Thank you for inviting us.
Niki (04:21)Yes, it's great to be talking with you both today.
Gaël Duez (04:23)Yeah, that's going to be a very interesting episode. And my first question might sound a bit dumb, but could you explain Kubernetes to our non-ops audience for a start?
Flavia (04:37)There's maybe an analogy that I read once and I thought it's pretty clear. If you think about a very busy restaurant where you have a lot of guests and you need to make a lot of food and you need to organize this so everything comes out. So there's enough food for everyone at the right time. can think about Kubernetes in that way. Kubernetes is the chef organizing all the cooks. You have maybe the containers can be thought of as the individual chefs. And each individual chef has to be in charge of making one specific dish. And then you have the nods, which are the kitchen stations for different purposes, like a kitchen station for grilling, another for baking, another for chopping. And then the pods are like a team of cooks working on one single order. like in Kubernetes, you need to handle load or scaling properly, right? You need to make sure that the orders go to the right people so that they don't get overloaded. You need to put more cooks on a specific dish which is more popular, et cetera. If one group of cooks have a problem with something, then there's always. Yeah, the authority and the organization to fix that. So concepts like scalability, reliability, you want your meal to get to the table and on time. Those are maybe nicely included in this metaphor.
Niki (06:34)And just remember for listeners who may be less familiar with the cloud, we're talking about hundreds of servers. So hundreds of computers and, how do you get the dish, which is the, application that a user is trying to, to access, available for hundreds if not thousands of users. So we need to make sure that this application is available on every server. And that's what Kubernetes does is it orchestrates that all of these dishes are available at all of the tables. So all of the applications are all of the servers for everyone to be able to enjoy them.
Gaël Duez (07:16)Got it. And now that you've mentioned all these servers, let's go to our main topic, which is what are, according to you, the top sustainably challenged running containers and maybe more specifically Kubernetes.
Niki (07:32)So monitoring and auto scaling is what I would say the two branches of sustainability in Kubernetes. So we need to make sure we run everything as efficiently as possible. So we need to make sure resources are allocated in the most efficient way. So to do that, we need to be able to observe these resources how much CPU, how much memory, energy, and various other things. And then on the auto scaling side, we need to ensure that we are not deploying more than what you need. So everything needs to be basically packed together as tightly as possible so that we don't have idle resources just laying around and not being used.
Flavia (08:23)So that's a really good document. And I hope that these resources translate around what you are being used.
Gaël Duez (08:30)And is it the case today? Because I've seen some numbers in non-scientific studies, so I won't quote them here, but saying that in general, we are facing a massive over-provisioning of resources due to auto-scaling and all of this, is it true or is it a urban legend according to your experiences?
Flavia (08:51)Yeah, it is very true. Last time I was at FOSDEM giving this talk and I asked people, did it ever happen to you that you found servers that were running that were not they didn't let me finish my sentence. Everybody was like, yeah. So, I mean, yes, this is, this is a very common problem. And I think it roots from the fact that, ever since we started using cloud, we can spin anything, anytime very easily without realizing the consequences immediately in terms of, yeah, not only price, but impact the environment
Gaël Duez (09:36)And this tendency to overuse them, how can we fight back, especially from a sustainability angle? I know that both of you, you've been working on a project named KEIT which, the goal to automate the monitoring of the energy consumption, but maybe it goes beyond and it goes all the way to carbon estimates. So you will correct me if I'm wrong
Flavia (10:02)So with KEIT, we are basically showing in what way your software and infrastructure and hardware cause an impact and what is source of this impact. Basically we use the software carbon intensity formula which is an ISO standard it considers three aspects. It considers the energy consumed by the software. It considers the carbon intensity of the energy used and the emissions of the hardware. in a way, you can see with the software carbon intensity, you can see where you have the most potential to improve. Or at least you can, you can observe it. can make changes and then you can improve. You can see as well which part of your software is, is generating most emissions. For example, looking at different namespace, looking at how many nods you have, et cetera.
Gaël Duez (11:06)OK, got it. And my question is, where does this number come from?
Niki (11:11)From the past two, three years while I've been building the CNCF environment sustainability TAG I've worked on the open source technologies that underlie the KEIT project. So I haven't worked on the KEIT project directly large part of what it's based on is open source tools that I've been maintaining or helping to build. And that includes, for example, Kepler, is an energy monitoring tool within Kubernetes. that is a tool that we could get very technical. Like really, some of the measurements from the kernel of the server. We basically, through Kepler, we're able how much energy is being consumed on the server and what is it linked to? which application is emitting or consuming this energy, which is measured in millijoules. So that's one of the components of the software carbon intensity specification to the same of that we have.
Gaël Duez (12:26)Niki, just to clarify, I've got a bunch of questions regarding KEIT. The first one being, when you extract the energy consumption from the kernel, is it a measurement or is it an assessment via some sort of a low-level model?
Flavia (12:45)You have both options because either have the, I don't know what it stands for, but the RAPL
Niki (12:53)Running average power limit.
Flavia (12:54)Okay, yeah, so component in the chip which lets you measure the energy consumption of the hardware or if not the nice thing of Kepler is that there are models to estimate them if you don't have a chip with the RAPL. But yeah, in general, course, everything is an estimation. even this RAPLE measurement. It measures only, I believe, the CPU but not everything else around it. So we do have to accept as engineers, even if we don't like it, that everything is an estimation and just work from there. It's better to have estimations than to have nothing.
Niki (13:41)Yeah, it's a model, right? So everything is a model. Some models are more useful than others. there are so many different ways to measure energy consumption. But then there's embodied carbon and the energy that went into building the physical components of the server, for example. But as Flavia mentioned also, we do have gaps there are gaps such as networking. like gateways and other networking components are notoriously hard to measure. I know there's different communities, like different open source communities, and there's conversations amongst us, but still networking is something a lot of people are working on and that is really difficult to measure.
Gaël Duez (14:34)So, if I understood right how KEIT works, you've got this energy consumption, either via RAPL or via other estimated model, that you translate into carbon emissions. Maybe this is the missing point. I guess you're using solutions like Electricity Maps or WattTime. Am I correct to assume this?
Flavia (14:56)Yes, exactly.
Gaël Duez (14:58)Okay, and then you add on top of it the embedded carbon from the servers, but you could not really include all the networking part. Is it correct summarize what you've said before like this?
Flavia (15:11)Yes, yes, I think so. So it's those three sides of it and their limitations, I would say, almost in all three parts of the formula, because for the embodied emissions, for example, it's very difficult to get information, already difficult to get embodied emissions, but they are usually incomplete because there's not information about the disposal or the recycling of it. It's not disclosed by data centers or by cloud providers, or they don't say how many years the hardware is being used because that also has an impact on the embodied emissions.
Gaël Duez (15:54)And do you use the data from the manufacturers or do you have other sources of data?
Flavia (15:59)We use Boavizta, which is from a French, non-profit. so they have a whole database of the different hardware. so they have an API. You can say, I have this. I don't know, instance type. Tell me what are the embodied emissions. in KEIT we do that dynamically because the instance types can change to include this in the formula and calculate the SCI score.
Gaël Duez (16:33)Thanks for the clarification. And do you have any success stories to share yet about how KEIT has been used in some organization or within some teams?
Flavia (16:44)Well, I do have to say it's at the very beginning, project, but We are the moment working with one client, which is the Consumers Association, a non-profit in the Netherlands. so we installed it because basically you have your cluster, can deploy pretty easily and then you have an overview of your score. But we also added this widget to show the number of nods that you're running. And then we immediately saw like, okay, we're running too many nods in an environment which is just for development. So we are now working on improving that on setting up carpenter consolidation to make sure that only the necessary nods are being used at a certain time that's a very, for me, very nice example where it's helping.
Niki (17:43)And at Grafana Labs also we're deploying Kepler at scale. It's quite challenging because Kepler for example, we mentioned, which is one of the components in the SCI and it relies on certain information that it should be able to fetch from the kernel but in the public cloud such as AWS, example, or GDP or Azure, this information may not be accessible. So there's certain other estimate methods that it needs to use. So all this to say that running this energy and carbon estimation models at scale is very difficult. And from my side at Grafana Labs, We are trying to run this at scale and kind of find which issues we come across and how can we deploy it in a production environment with as little issues as possible. So all of this is still a work in progress, but it's really great that we can come together in the open source community and kind of exchange this knowledge.
Gaël Duez (18:56)For the clarification that this project is still an early stage project. People interested in this specific project, they can join you at TAG sustainability group. And actually that leads me to a question I wanted to ask in the beginning of this interview could you help us maybe make some sense of the true alphabet soups around CNCF What is CNCF? What is TAG? What is the Green Reviews work group, for instance?
Niki (19:26)So the CNCF stands for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. it's a project actually of the Linux Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization that hosts a lot of open source projects. And the CNCF was created, I think in 2015, to host Kubernetes when it was
Flavia (19:41)I think 2015 took host Cabrera's when the organization was initially created by the...
Niki (19:49)Initially created by Google and then was donated to the Linux Foundation and the Linux Foundation created the CNCF to host it. And then other projects were hosted also by the CNCF such as Prometheus, which is a monitoring, well, a time series database for monitoring metrics. And then other projects joined and now there's, I don't know, like maybe dozens if not hundreds of sandbox projects. I'm not really sure on the number. But Kepler, which we talked about previously, is one of these sandbox projects that was donated by Red Hat and Intel the CNCF. So then with different subjects around this tool such as security, there was the creation of are technical advisory groups. And one of these tags that was created two years ago is the environmental sustainability TAG. And in this TAG, we promote and advocate for tools and use cases around cloud native sustainability, including Kepler, for example, and KEIT and other things like the SCI, the software carbon intensity specification. We talk about this at KubeCon, one of the biggest conferences that is related to the CNCF and FOSDEM as well. There have been talks about this cloud native sustainability tooling.
And finally, we come to about a year and a half ago, we wanted to have a technical project where we can really get into the nitty gritty of how do you deploy Kepler? How do you link carbon emissions metrics such as WattTime and Electricity Maps, how do you get the embodied metrics from Boavizta and how do you calculate the rates of the software carbon intensity of tools and we created the green reviews working group. The idea for that is create reports or we report on the sustainability metrics such as energy use and carbon intensity and other more traditional metrics such as CPU usage and memory usage. we've been doing that with Falco, which is a tool. It's a security tool, a project hosted by the CNCF to work with the students and care for the students. And other things so we've been basically trying and innovating and just new ideas come, new people come to contribute their ideas, they want to try something, and we have this space to make it happen. And KEIT is kind of emerged from this work, I think. Flavia, maybe you can tell us more. yeah.
Flavia (22:53)Well, we had this idea of making, we initially called it a sustainability plugin. So trying to reflect in a Kubernetes environment, the environmental impact of the infrastructure and software. And we a lot of ideas on things that we wanted to see there, only I thought it was pretty complicated. So I thought, how do we do this? And then I started looking around what's out there then I found the CNCF environmental sustainability TAG and I joined I saw this green reviews project and the software that was being worked on. I thought this is at least very good reflection of what we want to build. But for generic Kubernetes clusters. So I learned about the SCI and deploy actually maybe these things, because they are not so concrete, you don't see the power in it. But when I got to meet Nikki and all the people at the CNCF and I had the opportunity to go to KubeCon in Paris last year. It was amazing because it's not just about the who and the what, but it's about the people. So the energy that came out of that group, I like, want to be part of this. I want to, you know, join forces to build something together.
Gaël Duez (24:15)Actually, it's an interesting mention that you've done because I wanted to ask both of you a bit more about how it is to run source projects and to have this open source community working together, especially for, I would say, greater good project. Just before we jump on this of questions, to understand clearly what the Green Reviews Working Group is. I understood well, it's a bit of a permanent brainstorming work group on everything related to sustainability within the CNCF space. Or does it also has, I don't know, sub-team fully dedicated to maintain or code or create new products. I'm having a hard time understanding the connection between this work group and the tools that you've mentioned before, such as Kepler or KEIT.
Niki (25:20)So the environmental sustainability TAG is kind of the broader brainstorming group. In the Green Reviews working group, we are creating a benchmarking pipeline. So we are doing benchmarking tests for cloud native tools such as Falco.
Niki (25:40)to measure the softer carbon intensity rates. it's very similar to KEIT essentially, and we run benchmarking tests measure the different factors of the software carbon intensity specification. So that's the runtime energy, the emissions impact, the embodied carbon, and all of this using a unit of work, so like a rate. So yeah, the idea was, to take the software carbon intensity ISO specification when it became public last year, and to create an example using cloud native tooling to show how it can be done in Kubernetes.
Gaël Duez (26:20)Okay. And one last logistic question. If people want to join you, do their organization needs to join? Can it be done on a voluntary individual basis? Do they need to fill a form or how does it work concretely?
Niki (26:38)It's fully open source, so everything is completely out in the open. a Slack organization for the CNCF. And if folks Google CNCF community invitation, they will get a portal to where they can put their email address and get an invitation to join the CNCF Slack. I know that a lot of organizations join the CNCF, but we don't require that in the TAG or in the working group. So anyone can join the meetings. The meetings are twice a month. And we do a lot of planning during those meetings. And we talk about the different pull requests that people are working on or that need to be reviewed. then we triage some of the issues And we do have like a agile workflow. So anyone is welcome to join. And then we have our GitHub repo where people can see issues that are open and that are beginner friendly. And we have the issues board where people can see which ones are next and ready to be picked up if they want to contribute. So people often will join for a bit, maybe pick up an issue, contribute a way, learn. And then maybe they'll stay for more long term or some people come for a bit just to like learn. So just like any other open source project, really we're looking for contributors and long-term maintainers and we're open to everybody.
Gaël Duez (28:22)Talking about open source projects and Flavia mentioned it a bit earlier. FOSDEM celebrated its 25th anniversary this year. Shall we say that everything is doing well for the open source community and maybe more specifically for the projects related to sustainability? Or are there some challenges that we don't necessarily see beyond the success?
Flavia (28:46)Yeah, there's always challenges. especially that people find time to work on it. Because is an area where people get attracted to it because they want to do something good. They want to have a purpose. So you do find a lot of people wanting to join the environmental sustainability TAG or help in the green reviews project. But it's hard to find people who have the time or who are ready to spend some time on it.
Gaël Duez (29:23)Flavia, before discussing more specifically the time constraints, I had a specific question regarding the KEIT project when I see how imbricated it is with other open source projects. How do you manage to build something that is so heavily relying on other components which are also open source?
Flavia (29:47)Well, first of all, it's great to have those tools because otherwise we couldn't have built what we built. We just put them together. what we needed to check is the licensing to make sure that we are not infringing any of the licenses of the software that we are using. so far we've had good experience. for example, one of the projects that we are using is so there's electricity maps and there's an exporter for Prometheus to get that data into Kubernetes. It's called the grid intensity, From the GreenWeb Foundation. And it's also open source and there was something that didn't work exactly like we expected or we needed to make an improvement and we just made the change. Applied our PR. It was approved and problem solved. So in that sense, it can be easy because given the need, you can just make the changes yourself.
Niki (30:53)I think this is the issue of open source tooling and how well maintained it is, or if there is enough contribution to keep it running is kind of a bigger problem in the industry and for Kubernetes and the Kubernetes ecosystem as well. Like even though a lot of these projects are hosted by the CNCF. Oftentimes, there isn't everything that you might need your use case. And maybe someone needs to find time to contribute back to the open source project. For example, like if there's a feature missing or if there's a bug. Oftentimes there needs to be that kind of instinct of like, okay, this is missing. I'm going to take some time to contribute upstream. Upstream meaning to the open source project. And that's how the tools can continue to exist. But there also need to be long-term maintainers who are sponsored by their company, maybe, who are given the opportunity to take time to contribute to open source projects as part of their work. one of the main challenges in open source projects, I would say is, people finding time to contribute to this project.
Gaël Duez (32:18)Niki, that's very interesting that you mentioned people being employees of corporations, large or not, and having some of their professional time allocated to open source. Because I've been recently recording in releasing actually an episode on the WordPress sustainability group that has been quite brutally dismantled. And that was part of a bigger drama of WordPress governance it made me realize how much the WordPress community is dependent on automatic. Is it something that you fear also for the CNCF? Is it something that is more the exception than the rules or what is your? Yeah. Point of view on this dependency that we might find from time to time.
Niki (33:09)the CNCF has managed to build a huge community of people who are excited and able to contribute to their projects. And this is an extraordinary feat of like modern technology and like community building. So I would say I'm not. I'm not worried about Kubernetes itself or the really large projects hosted by the CNCF, there's always an underlying worry or an underlying realization that we need to contribute back to what we're using. And maybe that's kind of part of the success of all these open source projects. if a lot of companies are depending on it for their operations and then they have an incentive to contribute back to keep things running. a sociological aspect, I find it fascinating
Gaël Duez (34:09)And maybe because you've sort of already explained it, but if both of you, had to, I don't know, bring three ingredients to create the perfect recipe for a thriving open source community, such as the that you belong to, what would it be?
Niki (34:29)Great question.
Flavia (34:30)I would say purpose is one all these people also that you see in the open source community, like in conferences, like FOSDEM, they really believe in something. They are not just techies, but they, I mean, they are techies, but they, believe in the power of the people building something and being free and open. So purpose is one. Now what I was going to say, so everybody who is there really wants to be there, contribute to something bigger than themselves. And I wanted to mention because the TAG ecosystem in the CNCF now is going through a restructuring because well, after many years of the development of the Kubernetes software ecosystem, things changed. And so we used to have the TAG environmental sustainability, TAG security, TAG application delivery, and a couple more. And now this is all going to be restructured. Does this have anything to do with the current situation? Because the NCF, even if it's a… and nonprofits, it is based in the United States. Does it have anything to do with the political situation in the US? I don't know, maybe. So the TAG environmental sustainability will be renamed, will be part of a different TAG. My point being that even through all of this, there's all this bunch of people that I'm part of, which is want to continue. We don't care the naming. We just want to continue with what we are doing. I don't know in the case maybe of WordPress I don't know because I couldn't finish the episode of last time I don't know if the people who were working on it will continue because in the end it's all open source. You can still do what you want.
Niki (36:35)I mean, I think that the open source community enables us to work on things that otherwise would be difficult to do on the day to day. Because there will always be changes in the business direction, for example. Whereas open source work means you can always get back to it and continue some work and do it for as long as the community decides to work on that. So it does give a lot of freedom. another thing I would say is that new problems require new solutions. think innovating in the open is a great way to build new solutions. For me, innovating in the open is the best way to really bright and motivated people involved to come together and try to solve this together rather than behind closed doors, which is what business often is like. So it's really great to be able to maintain those spaces. And I'm glad that the Green Reviews Working Group will continue to exist as a project in the CNCF, despite of the reorganization that is happening. And we'll know more around KubeCon Europe, which is going to happen in April
Gaël Duez (38:01)Thanks a lot for sharing your opinions and your feedbacks on how to run successfully in open source community. I could not not hear some or expectations regarding this reorganization? Do you already have some information which has been shared or will it all come as a big surprise at KubeCon Europe as you say there, Niki?
Flavia (38:22)It was already shared, the reorganization. So there's going to be like five TAGS and sustainability will be part of, operational resilience, I think. So it will be more up to us to make this visible and to keep it going. the community is there, people want to improve. So we'll keep going.
Gaël Duez (38:57)Concretely speaking, it's a general reduction of the number of TAG groups within the NCF, am I right? Or is it just specifically targeting the environmental sustainability TAG?
Flavia (39:11)It's a reorganization of all the tags. So some are merged, some are new
Gaël Duez (39:13)Okay. Okay, got it. And so now you've got bigger tags, five only, and I guess they will structure in subgroups, subworking group, like some of them working more on operation or resiliency, efficiency, sustainability, or how will all those different projects will be maintained with this single big TAG, for instance.
Flavia (39:38)Yeah, there will be, I think, like sub-projects. in theory, working groups will continue running. They will just be part of a different TAG. So we will have to see if the chair of the talk where we are in, we hope that they all that is also someone who considers sustainability important. it's all volunteer work, but we get from the CNCF, we get resources for, for example, infrastructure and where to run our software, pipelines, our databases. So yeah, we'll see how this develops, but we all want to continue.
Niki (40:25)I'm excited also to see how sustainability can fit in the operational resilience kind of story, includes, for example, it observability, more concretely, like traditional observability, as opposed to like carbon observability, right? I think it's interesting to see how it will become part of that operational resiliency story. think it might actually, in the best case scenario, might help folks to explain how sustainability fits in software.
Flavia (41:09)It's software.
Niki (41:10)I guess
Flavia (41:10)I guess.
Niki (41:11)If we're talking about resiliency, I don't think it's too far away. I'm hoping to learn from that. I think having closer proximity to other domains will mean there will be a lot of like cross pollination of ideas and lessons learned and more contributors maybe, maybe contributors who would not have approached sustainability, learn more about it by being in the same TAG. So I'm hoping to find like positives from this and I guess we'll talk about it more at KubeCon and we'll see how it will go.
Gaël Duez (41:52)That's a good point and it's a very optimistic way to see things that I really enjoy. Maybe we will have to redo an episode in a few months or before the end of the year to see how, yeah, to be continued. Yes, absolutely. to understand a bit how things developed. The WordPress situation was a worrying signal, but it doesn't mean that all the open source community needs to be continued, shut down sustainability or reorganize it. So if you feel optimistic, that's great. And I think on these very positive notes we can close this podcast.
Flavia (42:29)Yeah.
Gaël Duez (42:32)I really want to thank both of you for joining and explaining both the projects you've been running, but also the way you've been dealing with these open source projects and how this open source community at CNTF works. that was really enlightening. So thanks a lot for joining the show today.
Niki (42:53)Thank you so much for having us.
Flavia (42:53)Thank you, it was fun.
Niki (42:54)Thank you so much for having us.
Flavia (42:54)Thank you, it was fun.
Gaël Duez (42:56)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it on social media and TAG your connections working in cloud operations and DevOps. If you attend KubeCon next week, this would also be a useful tool to kickstart conversations. And of course, don't forget to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. It helps us reach out to more soon-to-be responsible technologists. 
In our next episode, we will celebrate a birthday with Sarah Hsu. A year ago, her book, Building Green Software, was released. And she will tell us everything about its impact, the feedback she received with her co-author Anne Curie and Sarah Bergman, and the trends she sees in green software, including AI training and inference. Stay tuned! 
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"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.

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Joanna and Joanne’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode

• Agilist4Planet 
• Agile Alliance sustainability initiative and Agile Sustainability manifesto
• We hope magazine
• green-po.org 
• piratejo.co.uk 
• Sustainability incubator project (SIPS) 
• Green Software Foundation

Transcript 
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 stories
Joanne 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 frustrating
Gaël 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)HAHAHAHA
Gaël 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 make
Joanne 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 good
Joanne 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 a
Gaël 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.



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