“Balancing Sustainable Computing and Computing for Sustainability,” a new Communications of the ACM (CACM) opinion article, asks us to look at the issue of sustainability in computing research from two complementary perspectives: sustainable computing and computing for sustainability. The article was instigated and authored by a group of Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Members passionate about the topic, who brought together experts across disciplines to explore how computing can both mitigate its effects on the environment and support sustainability work.
The complete list of authors includes:
- Michela Taufer, University of Tennessee Knoxville
- Chandra Krintz, UC Santa Barbara
- Elizabeth Bradley, University of Colorado Boulder
- Michael Crowley, University of Southern California
- Tevfik Kosar, University of Buffalo
- Siddharth Shiladitya Parida, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
- Masood Parvania, University of Utah
- Eve Schooler, University of Oxford
- Utkarsh Shah, Google
- Bronis R. De Supinski, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
- Adam Wierman, California Institute of Technology
See the registration at the bottom of this page to hear directly from these authors in an upcoming CCC Community Chat webinar and Q&A.
CCC Task Force Origins
CCC task forces are groups of computing researchers, composed of CCC Council Members and outside experts, who have identified a long-term computing challenge and aim to produce a resource to help guide the community. In 2023, when Michela Taufer and Adam Wierman joined the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council, the first discussions of a piece like “Balancing Sustainable Computing and Computing for Sustainability” were already taking place. At the time, Elizabeth Bradley and Chandra Krintz were part of a CCC task force on sustainability in computing; with the additions of Michela and Adam, they worked together to define the scope of the work.
Partly, this meant reconciling the fact that the very same computing advances that often support sustainability work and research also impact the environment through their significant energy demands. They knew that they wanted that tension to be front and center in their work, and that they wanted the input and participation of members of the broader computing community on this topic.
To that end, they ultimately invited other members of the community to join them in speaking at two different CCC-funded panels: one at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC24) in Atlanta, GA in 2024, and the second at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2025 Annual Meeting in Boston, MA. They supplemented the discussion with panelists from different research backgrounds, as well as connected directly with two different audiences key to the conversation: the developers of high-energy computing technologies and advances, as well as their users.
In Michela Taufer’s words, “We had these visions and these ideas, but we had to find a way to come together and coordinate so that what we were doing became a roadmap for the whole community. And it was CCC that enabled us to come together to do that.”
Balancing Sustainability
In the end, the authors draw an important distinction between sustainable computing and computing for sustainability in the CACM article. Sustainable computing involves minimizing the environmental footprint of digital infrastructure — the digital infrastructure that, notoriously, has led to the proliferation and impact of widespread data centers. Computing for sustainability, on the other hand, means applying computational tools to solve pressing environmental sustainability challenges. The article argues that both approaches are critical for improving computing’s impact on the world, and that coordinated multidisciplinary action — involving computing research, technology development, and governance — is the key to striking that balance.
For author Adam Wierman, that balance is not only achievable, but deeply urgent. “The energy demand of AI has already outrun what the grid was built to deliver,” he said. “Coordinating computing with the grid by shifting work in time and place is no longer optional.”
CCC’s mission of convening across all sectors of the computing research community also had a significant impact on the ultimate direction of the article. Chandra Krintz highlighted the necessity of working together across disciplines and sectors to make their vision a reality, and how CCC uniquely positioned them to make those connections: “Computing has a unique dual role in sustainability: we must reduce the energy and resource demands of the technologies we create, while harnessing those same technologies to address some of society’s most pressing challenges. Neither goal can be achieved by one discipline alone. Through CCC, we have been able to bring together perspectives from across computing, energy, science, policy, and industry to begin building a shared path forward.”
Join the Conversation
Want to learn more about balancing sustainability and hear directly from the article authors? Join the upcoming CCC Community Chat!
Powering the Solution: Balancing Computing’s Energy Demands with its Contributions to Sustainability is a one-hour webinar and Q&A that will take place on Thursday, October 8, 2026 at 3 p.m. ET. This is your chance to better understand how computing can contribute to a more sustainable world and ask the authors, who are experts in the field, any burning questions you may have. Register below!
Register Here
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This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award No. 2300842. This award supports the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), a programmatic committee of the Computing Research Association (CRA). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
