Latest reports suggest that the ICT sector emits about 2% of global CO2 emissions, and has now surpassed the airline industry in terms of the levels of its impact. Others suggest that the digital sector will emit as much as 4% of total greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years.
Source: https://www.ictworks.org/digital-technologies-climate-change-problem/#.YIFZLegzY2w
This year the theme of Earth Day is #RestoreOurEarth, so as Software developers let's try to do our part in restoring Earth.
1) Performance : Try to keep your websites light, you can optimize assets, use lazy loading, optimize your code(it's basic for any website nowadays). This won't even just impact the environment but make your users super happy with the website's performance.
2) Videos: Use links to youtube videos instead of embedding the entire video on the website as it takes a lot of bandwidth to transfer data even before it is being interacted with.
3) CSS cleanup: Often we have unused CSS laying in our code and since every character takes weight even after it's compressed, try to do a clean-up once a while to get rid of unwanted CSS.
4) HTTP requests : Reduce the number of HTTP requests check for situations where you are maybe calling an API in a loop you can try to send the entire data in a single request, it will make the code more performant.
5) Green Hosting : Host your websites on data centers that rely on renewable energy. Find out more about green web hosts on https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/.
6) Contribute: You can contribute to some environment-friendly open source projects.
List of open-source projects dedicated to improving our environment:
Planet 4
Eco Hacker Farm
Public Lab
Open Climate Workbench
Open Source Ecology
Pangeo
Leaflet
Mozilla Science Lab
This Earth day let's try to commit time to these projects and do our bit for mother earth.
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