Quell Carbon Emission with Green Code

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain the impact that the ICT sector has on GHG emissions.
Understand how green code can accelerate the world’s journey to net zero.
Locate further reading resources on green code best practices.

The Environmental Impact of Digitalization

While digitalization has brought significant improvements to our society, it also contributes to global warming. The tech industry, including the information and communications technology (ICT) sector, is responsible for a considerable portion of these emissions. It’s estimated that this sector is responsible for up to 3.9% of global GHG emissions, exceeding emissions by the aviation and shipping sectors. But what’s scary is that if we continue business as usual, the IT sector will be responsible for 14% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2040.

The main concern lies in data centers that rely on electricity to power their operations. Depending on their location and the time of day, data centers often source electricity from fossil fuel-based resources, resulting in planet-warming carbon emissions. As digital technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and big data solutions continue to grow, the energy consumption—and in turn the carbon emissions—of data centers becomes a major concern. We must take immediate action and address this issue directly.

You may have heard terms like green software, green code, sustainable software engineering, digital sustainability, or sustainable IT. While they each have nuanced definitions, broadly speaking, they reflect a growing movement to reduce the environmental impact associated with digital technology. ClimateAction.tech, Green Software Foundation, and ResponsibleComputing.net are just a few of the organizations spearheading thought leadership in this space.

The Salesforce Commitment to Environmental Responsibility

At Salesforce, our core values guide everything we do as a company and highlight our focus on pursuing Sustainability in tandem with Equality, Trust, Customer Success, and Innovation. Salesforce has a strong history of climate action.

Our vision:

Accelerate the world’s largest businesses to net zero.
Sequester 200 gigatons of carbon through conserving, restoring, and growing 1 trillion trees.
Protect our oceans.
Energize the ecopreneur revolution.

For more information explore the Create a Sustainable Future trail and our Climate Action Plan.

“We need all businesses to use not only their influence, but also their core competencies to rapidly innovate to tackle climate change.”

—Suzanne DiBianca, Chief Impact Officer, Salesforce

At the heart of the Salesforce Climate Action Plan is the reduction of our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in line with a 1.5°C future. To achieve this, Salesforce recognizes the importance of addressing the environmental impact of our operations by taking steps to minimize our carbon footprint and promoting sustainable practices.

Salesforce hosts products in data centers, so to track our progress we created a metric called Carbon to Serve. It measures emissions against the work done by its applications. The goal is to achieve the same outcomes with fewer resources, like processing power and servers. Since establishing the metric in 2020, Salesforce has achieved a 26% reduction and aims to continue reducing emissions in the future.

Small Changes, Big Impacts

Even small changes in software development can have significant impacts on a company's carbon footprint and financial bottom line. The Salesforce company MuleSoft, for example, achieved a 14% reduction in yearly public cloud infrastructure spending by identifying and decommissioning underutilized systems and migrating storage to more energy-efficient alternatives. These efforts not only contribute to emissions reduction but also demonstrate that sustainability and cost savings can go hand in hand. By making small changes at scale, we can make a big difference.

The Role of Technologists in Environmental Protection

Everyone, including technologists, has a role to play in protecting the planet. Designers, architects, developers, and operations managers want digital services that are environmentally friendly, but many do not know what steps they can take individually. Salesforce research shows that nearly half (45%) of technologists don’t know how to develop software applications that do less harm to the environment.

However, the drive and interest to do so is there! 72% of technologists believe sustainable skills training and development is the most important first step. A lack of awareness and knowledge is the top barrier to sustainable software development and ICT emission reduction.

This is why Salesforce created the Sustainable Developer Guide for Salesforce Technology to raise collective awareness and share how technologists can use their unique skills to make a positive impact in their day-to-day work.

Sustainability Guide for Salesforce Technology

The Salesforce Green Code initiative is all about making software more environmentally friendly. As part of this initiative, Salesforce has created the Sustainable Developer Guide for Salesforce Technology. This guide is a helpful tool that gives technologists tips and advice on how to reduce the environmental impact of using Salesforce products, and software in general. By following this guide, technologists can create software that's not just secure, accessible, and performant, but also minimizes harm to the planet.

The guide focuses on four key areas: design & UX, architecture, development, and operations.

Design & UX: Designers can reduce energy use while providing a better user experience by making sustainability a design requirement and building a faster experience with fewer steps in data flow.

Architecture: Choosing the right architectural pattern and deployment model for software development can lead to cost savings and reduce environmental impact. Software architects have a significant role to play in achieving this by integrating reusable APIs, enabled by MuleSoft, and preventing runaway code through governor limits built into the Lightning Platform.

Development: Sustainable code is key. Developing software code that uses less energy can lead to significant emissions reductions, particularly when deployed at scale. Salesforce Lightning apps are lightweight and deliver exceptional performance due to the apps being coded to run natively in browsers. Such well-architected Salesforce code can result in up to 60% improvement in performance from areas such as a decrease in Experience Page Time. These efficiency improvements aren’t just valuable for reducing overall system overhead, but also illustrate a significant reduction in energy use—benefiting carbon to serve and an organization’s carbon footprint.

Operations: By locating capacity in the right regions and scheduling workloads during high renewable energy periods, companies can reduce their carbon emissions. Salesforce is focusing on decarbonization efforts through innovations like Hyperforce, its public cloud infrastructure architecture, which offers sustainability and functionality benefits to customers.

Data from Salesforce Snapshot Research: Green Code Gap is based on a survey of 1,059 technologists at companies of all sizes and sectors across the United States (N: 345), the United Kingdom (N: 374), and Australia (N: 340). The survey was conducted in partnership with YouGov in April 2023.

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