Green DiSC is a new certification scheme which provides a roadmap for research groups and institutions who want to tackle the environmental impacts of their computing activities. Check out the Green DiSC page for full details!
Computing is an essential component of modern research, and it comes with significant, but not always well-understood, environmental impacts. With the urgency of the climate crisis, it is becoming increasingly apparent to scientists using computing that the resulting environmental effects should be taken into account and mitigated where possible. Last year, UKRI released its roadmap for Net-Zero Digital Infrastructure and more recently, major funders and universities joined the Concordat for the Environmental Sustainability of Research and Innovation Practice. It is now key to give research groups and institutions a framework to achieve these ambitions.
A few figures: the global carbon footprint of data centres is estimated at ~126 MT CO2e per year (mega tonnes of CO2-equivalent), equivalent to the entire US commercial aviation. It is not uncommon to have scientific computations reaching tonnes of CO2e and some Artificial Intelligence models have been shown to pass 500 T CO2e. For context, the IPCC target to keep global warming under 1.5C is around 2 tonnes per year and per person.
Until now computing groups didn’t have a roadmap to help tackle the environmental impacts of their work (contrary to wet labs for example, or clinical trials). This has prompted a partnership between the team behind the Green Algorithms project at the University of Cambridge and the Software Sustainability Institute to come up with such a framework… and Green DiSC was born!
Three levels of certifications will be available: Bronze, Silver and Gold. We set it up with some overarching principles in mind:
- Evidence-based, to ensure that the criteria included have the maximum impact on research sustainability while favouring engagement with the framework.
- Free and open access, so that all scientists can engage with this framework.
- Iterative, so that the criteria developed evolve, as institutions’ policies change and our understanding of environmental impacts progresses.
- Community-based, to leverage the great resources being designed internally by different universities.
Over the past 18 months, we have run a pilot with over 30 researchers taking part, with institutions in the UK and Europe. Following this successful pilot, we are now in a position to roll it out more widely, with the initial launch (starting now!) restricted to a small number of groups in the first instance due to limited resources. We are onboarding teams progressively on a first-come first-served basis in order to enrol as many as possible while we build up capacity. But all criteria are open-access, so institutions can start working on them as soon as they enter the scheme. In this first release, groups can complete the Bronze level.
Who is it for? Green DiSC can be completed by anyone working in research, across any research domain. There are criteria aimed at research groups and separate criteria for central teams (e.g. a sustainability team or an IT team). Ideally, research groups and central teams work together to complete the process, with the central team addressing common infrastructures and research groups focusing on their activities, but of course, it can also be completed independently (just as a group or just as a central team).
The launch of this digital sustainability framework is a very exciting time, if you want to learn more about this, check out the Green DiSC page. We will also hold two online information sessions to present the scheme and answer any questions you may have, just register for the newsletter to receive the links nearer the time:
- Thursday 18 July 2024 at 3pm BST
- Tuesday 17 September 2024 at 10am BST