Main Takeaways
- Much of web performance optimization overlaps with sustainable web development practices – especially when it comes to reducing the amount of data transferred on a site and implementing performance budgets to prevent regressions.
- The biggest impact web perf experts can make with regards to sustainability involves non-technical actions:
- learning about sustainable software practices
- raising awareness for the topic
- helping to determine what not to build and what to delete
- taking the entire lifespan of data products into consideration
- While currently measuring the carbon impact of websites relies on proxy metrics and rough estimations, we still should still observe them and investigate problems.
- We need better metrics and APIs to better estimate emissions due to device use and embodied carbon.
Resources
- Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Sector, ourworldindata.org
- “The real climate and transformative impact of ICT: A critique of estimates, trends, and regulations” (2021) by Charlotte Freitag, Mike Berners-Lee, et al.
- “The Scientists Watching Their Life’s Work Disappear”, New York Times, Oct. 26, 2023
- The Jevons Paradox, Wikipedia
- The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)
- California’s SB 253, the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act (CCDAA)
- Web Sustainability Guidelines, a W3C Community Draft Report
- An overview of the Web Sustainability Guidelines with the highest impact and lowest-medium effort
- Building Green Software (2024, preview) by Anne Currie, Sarah Hsu, Sara Bergman
- “Why do estimates for internet energy consumption vary so drastically?” by Tom Greenwood
- Green Software Practitioner by the Green Software Foundation
“Calculating Digital Emissions” on sustainablewebdesign.org - Page weight report on HTTP Archive