Green Software Foundation: Software Decarbonization Mission

When Hussain and Podder met at the Sustainability Hackathon as judges and realized that their two organizations had similar positions, they knew they had to work together. Other large organizations were also interested. They all agreed that instead of entering into bilateral or trilateral agreements, it would be more effective to create a foundation.

Founding members—Accenture, Microsoft, Thoughtworks, GitHub, Goldman Sachs, WattTime, The Green Web Foundation, and Leaders for Climate Action—founded the Green Software Foundation with a mission to reduce the total change in global carbon emissions associated with software. The foundation launched in 2021 and now has over 60 members, a mix of corporations, academia, and nonprofits, all working together to achieve the same goal.

Striving for practical solutions

Long before the Green Software Foundation, when climate protection was just a concept, companies routinely published Corporate Software Responsibility (CSR) reports and issued press releases about their commitment to sustainability. But these efforts yielded little in the way of real, quantitative results, and critics were quick to accuse them of “greenwashing,” arguing that the announcements were merely a way to improve the organization’s image.