Pitching green initiatives

How do you convince your boss, your colleagues, or even yourself, that reducing the carbon footprint of your web application is a good idea?

In a perfect world it would be enough that reducing energy consumption is good for the planet. We know that the climate crisis is real and that, in varying capacities, we all have a role to play in keeping the situation under control. Realistically though, we need to accept that currently this is a tough sell and that taking action for the greater good might not be enough to convince everyone.

Web applications have no direct, observable impact on our natural landscape, so as developers we don't face the same criticisms as other industries. The fact that websites even have a carbon footprint is completely invisible to most people. This can obscure the benefits of making our our applications more sustainable. Our users won't notice, and we won't see any benefit ourselves, so why should we care?

This is a completely fair challenge - however, it is countered very easily: The digital industry is luckier than many others in one crucial way: Reducing the energy footprint of a web application almost always carries associated benefits. We present some of these here in an effort to help you sell this idea to others.

It doesn't need to be lots of work

People often worry that being environmentally friendly will be expensive, disruptive, and time-consuming. Sometimes these perceptions are absolutely real and can be major blockers to taking action. A development shop is a business after all and most digital businesses are likely to be running very tight deadlines to deliver ambitious features for their users. It is understandable, then, that a company may be behind the idea of being greener in principle but not to the point where they'd consider dedicating any time or resources to it.

Browse through the prompts on this site though, and you will see that many of them represent very small, simple changes that do not contribute any significant overhead to development costs - the only thing standing in the way for many of the techniques is simply a lack of knowledge or awareness. Our prompts are specifically designed as quick-reads to overcome this very hurdle. Even if the only changes you make to your application are the really easy ones, you could still end up making a big difference and seeing huge rewards.

It'll save you money

It's a fact of life that your hosting provider is not in the business of giving out free lunches. The tarrifs for most providers include costs which are directly and proportionally related to your CPU and Data usage. Coincidentally, these are the two major things you need to minimize in order to make your website more sustainable. The upshot of this is that reducing the energy footprint of your web application will almost always also mean a reduction in your hosting costs.

It'll make your users happier

There is a massive crossover between good user experience and good sustainability. Don't confuse your users - not only will they spend less time clicking around your site and wasting battery/consuming data, they are also more likely to have a better experience. Design a clear, unobtrusive user journey through your application and make it fast - you will not only save on energy consumption, you will also make your customers happier.

It future-proofs your organization

The climate crisis is becoming more and more urgent, and it is only a matter of time before the metrics around carbon emissions become a major factor in the day to day running of organizations. Among the factors are:

• We will see a younger generation of more climate-focussed employees who are more likely to include sustainability policies among the criteria they use to select an employer.
• Data and CPU might become more expensive. Currently we are seeing prices mostly heading downwards as hosting companies compete with each other to be the most affordable. At some point, legistlation may be introduced forcing hosting providers to invest in more sustainable infrastructure - a cost which they will almost certainly pass on to the customer.
• Due dilligence in acquisitions could begin to see investors looking for carbon neutrality and sustainable policies as major factors in whether or not to acquire businesses.
• Browsers may start making carbon usage more visible - there are already plugins that display carbon usage on websites which may one day become standard. If this happens, your users may become more discerning, choosing which companies to buy from based on their digital carbon footprint. Can you risk the reputational damage of being seen as a "dirty" website by your customers?
• SEO companies such as Google already punish heavier or slower websites in terms of page rank - this means the more environmentally friendly sites will appear nearer to the top of search results. As the world moves towards being more sustainable, failure to act might see you dropping in the search rankings and losing customers.
• Digital agencies may start to see sustainability featuring high on their customers list of requirements - and even if that doesn't start happening, including it in your pitches is a great way to stand out from the crowd and potentially open your customer's eyes to a value-add they hadn't even thought of.

This list could go on for much longer. Whilst all of the above are just educated predictions (this is the nature of futurology after all) are they really so far fetched? When you consider that making the right changes can be simple and affordable, we firmly believe that it is a bigger risk to ignore these than it is to factor them into your future strategies.