The Need for a Green ICT Reference Framework
This addresses the challenge of managing ICT sustainability for stakeholders like policymakers and industry, but it is incremental as it builds on existing efforts without introducing a new method or paradigm.
The paper tackles the problem of assessing and governing the sustainability impacts of ICT systems, which are hindered by structural complexity and fragmented practices, by proposing a shared Green ICT reference framework to integrate sustainability across perspectives, domains, lifecycle phases, and governance contexts, with an initial framework developed as a first step.
The sustainability impacts of ICT systems are difficult to assess and govern due to structural complexity, fragmented measurement practices, and unclear responsibilities across system layers. We argue that these challenges cannot be addressed solely by metrics and motivate the need for a shared Green ICT reference framework that integrates sustainability across multiple perspectives and domains, lifecycle phases, and governance contexts. We present an initial framework developed within the Informatics Europe Green ICT Working Group as a first step towards a comprehensive reference framework.