Beyond Carbon

Hacking for good

The Green Software Foundation(GSF) recently ran a hackathon based on their Impact Framework(IF), which I took part in as part of a team. The IF is a modular observation and modelling tool for analysing software.

About the Impact Framework

So far the main use case of the IF has been the calculation of the carbon emmissions of software running on a piece of hardware. Carbon is a popular but flawed metric that doesn't account for the full impact, so it was interesting to our team that one of the prize categories was 'beyond carbon'.

Looking at the judging criteria, it listed the following ecological ceilings:

> - Climate change

> - Ocean acidification

> - Chemical pollution

> - Nitrogen & phosphorus loading

> - Freshwater withdrawals

> - Land conversion

> - Rate of Biodiversity loss

> - Air pollution

> - Ozone layer depletion

GSF hack judging criteria

All three of our team are interested in or involved with biodiversity projects, so naturally we chose that to investigate. Turns out biodiversity hard. Not only was the data needed to calculate any meaningful information lacking in the existing plugins, but even if we could identify which land was used, we did not have the time or knowledge to create a comprehensive model for the whole world. So in the interest of creating a more meaningful model and keeping to the unix philosophy(another judging criteria) we started looking at creating a plugin for calculating land intensity of software.

There were already plugins that estimated the energy usage of cloud computing and data transfer over the internet so we could build on that. We found a UN data source for the land usage intensity of different energy sources and from the grid mix were able to estimate the land use intensity each year for a piece of software.

We did end up getting nominated for the 'beyond carbon' prize which was a great accomplishment, though it did make not getting the $6500 cash prize for first place harder to swallow.

You can read more about our plugin and find other teams submissions using the link below:

Our GSF hack submission