Democratizing Access to Sustainable Computing Tools—Meet Susannah Hill of Cloud Sustainability Watch
Making green computing knowledge accessible and actionable for all practitioners.
Susannah is a co-founder and the president of Cloud Sustainability Watch and a thought leader in cloud sustainability. She is leading the initiative with a group of volunteers who care about minimizing the environmental impact of Cloud computing, AI, and data centers.
Can you tell us about Cloud Sustainability Watch?
A group of tech professionals participating in a sustainability fellowship with Climatebase discussed the need for a single hub for all the green computing information and tools available across the web. In 2024, we created Cloud Sustainability Watch as a nonprofit website where technologists can find high-quality information, guides for green computing projects, and directories of links to tools, classes, and groups that make up the world’s green software community.
Our free Tech Professionals’ Guide to Sustainable Computing serves as the first step for software developers, web developers, architects, Dev/Cloud Ops, and IT leaders to mitigate the environmental impacts of cloud instances, software, and websites.
We also provide a Digital Sustainability Checklist for assessing digital personal activity.
Our mission is to help everyone become equipped and knowledgeable.
How does sustainability manifest in your organization?
Cloud Sustainability Watch is an online resource for discovering and advocating for green computing.
Our website reflects our mission by embodying sustainable web design principles. It’s hosted on Viridio, a green data center in Southern California that uses electricity from a nearby solar farm, consumes no water for cooling, and doesn’t use diesel generators for backup power. Based on our research, Viridio offers industry-leading sustainability practices.
We employed the UK sustainable web specialists erjjio to design our website and have achieved an Ecograder score of A.
How do you hope to contribute to and benefit from the GSF?
We value GSF as an organization that’s changing software development culture to prioritize sustainability alongside security and performance.
As the ICT field grows, it becomes more important to make sure the quality of tools and information remains high. I’m working on the W3C’s web sustainability guidelines and believe in the value of standards for making change happen faster and go farther. The GSF has several projects around expanding the Software Carbon Intensity specification, and I see that as a good place to get involved and help shape how we measure and reduce software’s impacts across the industries.
What challenges and opportunities can you share as you look to reduce the environmental impacts of software?
The main challenge in reducing the environmental impact of software is raising awareness among technologists that their products drive carbon emissions, water consumption, and other community impacts. There is an awareness problem in the climate solutions and climate tech industries, which is where I might expect to see the first steps toward action.
Cloud Sustainability Watch serves the technologist who has already heard about the environmental impacts of software and wants to spend 5 minutes learning what steps to take. We aim to be the go-to place for actionable insights.