As technology advances and becomes an increasingly ubiquitous aspect of everyday life, researchers and the world at large must consider ways to minimize negative effects caused by computing to ensure sustainable development. A large area of concern is environmental impacts, including computing’s contributions to climate change. The Computing Community Consortium has been supporting research in this area in a multitude of ways including a white paper Computing Research for the Climate Crisis and the creation of the Computing and Challenges to Humanity: Climate task force which focuses on climate change/sustainable computing. Recently, Assistant Director for the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate, Margaret Martonosi, released […]

Earlier this week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, released their Climate Change 2021- The Physical Science Basis Report. The report is sobering. We know that human activity is changing the climate in unprecedented and sometimes irreversible ways, but this recent report warns of increasingly extreme heatwaves, droughts and flooding, and a key temperature limit being broken in just over a decade. It shows how catastrophic the outlook will be if we don’t act now.  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has released a new whitepaper on Computing Research for the Climate Crisis, coauthored by Nadya […]