Revisiting Green Software: From Silicon to Screen
In this video, I walk through the Green Software Foundation’s expanded vision for green software — a shift we announced in June 2026, and one I believe defines the next chapter of this field.
The definition, restated for 2026
When the Foundation was formed in 2021, the conversation rightly centred on carbon. Five years on, the definition has grown with the field:
Software, and the hardware it runs on, designed, built, and operated to minimize its carbon emissions, energy consumption, water usage, and waste across every layer of the technology stack, from silicon to screen.
Every phrase in that sentence is deliberate. Software, and the hardware it runs on — because every line of code eventually consumes electrons on physical hardware that was mined, manufactured, shipped, powered, cooled, and one day disposed of. Carbon, energy, water, and waste — four dimensions, not one. From silicon to screen — because every layer of the stack has decisions to make, and every layer has an impact.
Why the vision expanded now
The pace of change made this unavoidable. Generative AI has put unprecedented pressure on compute, energy, and water. Hardware refresh cycles are tightening as accelerator generations move faster than ever. Data centres are being sited around the availability of power and cooling, not just connectivity. And regulators across the EU, the UK, Asia, and North America are converging on disclosure regimes that directly affect software.
Beyond carbon: why one metric is not enough
Carbon remains the anchor — the SCI specification is the world’s first ISO-aligned standard for measuring software’s carbon impact, and everything we’ve built rests on it. But carbon alone no longer captures the full picture. A workload optimized for carbon may still consume considerable water for cooling. An energy-efficient system may still drive premature hardware turnover and the embodied emissions that come with it. The four dimensions interact — optimizing one without seeing the others can displace the problem rather than solve it.
There is also a very practical reason to care: cost. Energy is the largest variable operating expense in modern technology infrastructure, water restrictions are reshaping where data centres can be built, and hardware costs are rising as accelerator demand outpaces supply. The same engineering decisions that reduce environmental impact reduce the cost of running software.
Six layers, from silicon to screen
The vision treats the stack as a single architecture with six layers of decisions: hardware and devices (embodied carbon, lifecycle, end-of-life), infrastructure and cloud (regions, cooling, power sourcing — where the new Software Water Intensity work sits), platforms and runtimes (how efficiently the hardware below gets used), data, AI, and ML (where SCI for AI, ratified at the end of 2025, gives the industry its first consensus standard for measuring AI emissions), applications and experience (the patterns developers touch daily), and governance and observability (measurement, disclosure, and the connection to frameworks like CSRD and the EU AI Act — without this layer, the other five are unverified claims).
What this means in practice
For practitioners: the decisions you already make — architecture, region, instance type, model selection, caching, payload size — are sustainability decisions, and always have been. The difference is that the industry now has, or is building, the standards to measure them and the patterns to make better choices the default. For decision-makers: sustainability is no longer a separate workstream from cost discipline, capacity planning, or AI strategy. It is the same workstream, viewed through a different lens.
Where we’re heading
The Foundation’s roadmap moves this from vision to practice: accelerating the energy and water standards alongside the carbon work, operationalizing Green AI — taking SCI for AI from ratified specification into bootcamps, best practices, and reference architectures for Green Agentic AI — extending SCI into new domains, and turning standards into open tooling and agent-ready skills that practitioners can use directly.
The full vision is in the Foundation’s article, and the door is open: if your organization is serious about this work, the Foundation is where the standards and practices are being shaped — in the open, together.