Overview over the first decade of LIMITS
This paper provides an overview and trend analysis for the LIMITS research community, helping to understand its development and identify areas for future research and global impact.
This paper analyzes 160 publications from the LIMITS workshop (2015-2025) to map the field of 'computing within limits'. It found an increasing mention of degrowth and post-growth, especially in 2024-2025, and a broadening, though still limited, global perspective beyond the Global North.
Computing within limits is a promising field, that follows principles of a) questioning endless growth narrative, b) considering and preparing for models of scarcity and c) reducing energy and material consumption, while considering d) a global spatial scale and e) long time frames. With computing's environmental impact growing and ecological limits becoming increasingly pressing, the LIMITS workshop has served as a central venue for this community since its inception in 2015, but an overview of the research published there has yet to be described. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing 160 publications from the LIMITS workshop in the period 2015 to 2025 to identify its international spread, contributions and developments in relation to field's core concerns, combining programmatic analysis with a manual review. Our findings indicate that the field has increasingly mentioned degrowth and post-growth, especially in 2024-2025. It has broadened its global perspective, with a growing, but still limited, representation of work beyond the Global North. The majority of papers are positional or observational, while artifact-producing research remains relatively scarce, though solution-oriented output has grown in recent years. This paper contributes to the LIMITS community by mapping its first decade and current trends to support future research and enhance its global impact.