Due to the urgency of the climate crisis, there is a pressing need to reduce the environmental impact of research. To achieve significant reductions, culture change is required across the entire research landscape, including across the research software community. Research software contributes to the environmental impact of research, but can research software engineers play a key role in helping to adapt to minimise this environmental impact? Would placing RSEs at the core of net-zero roadmaps for digital research infrastructures help the transition?
In this session we will outline the scale of the problem and introduce a number of projects that are aiming to address it (including tools, certification, best practices). We will introduce a few different ways to get involved including a new Special Interest Group on “Green RSEs” (affiliated with SocRSE) and a wider ESCS community for Environmentally Sustainable Computational Science.
During the session, we will work together to draft a “green research software roadmap” which sets out our commitment to addressing the topic and helps to identify what the community feels is required to make the urgent progress required. Development of this roadmap will help us to identify the key priority areas and start to develop plans to address them.
By bringing a diverse range of voices and opinions together to discuss the next steps in open discussion, we aim to produce an informed roadmap and start to build a community of practice around this vital topic.