We’ll kick off with a brilliant advocacy resource from digital sustainability pioneer Laurent Devernay Satyagraha. Laurent is at the forefront of the “Numerique Responsable” movement in France and holds strong, data backed opinions on the importance of digital sustainability.

While being more sustainable is something that every business should be striving for in all aspects of their operations, taking action on the digital side can take a back seat to other priorities. To combat this Laurent has gathered stories of digital sustainability principles being adopted by businesses and the co-benefits they experienced as a result.

If you’ve ever wanted examples to support your pitches for a more sustainable digital product or website, you’ll find multiple examples of big businesses reaping the benefits on the site.

I’ve been following Lauren Pope’s blog and newsletter ever since I shared her Spite House article on AIs influence on the free web in issue 71.  Lauren is a content strategist and content designer with a strong moral code and infectious curiosity. She’s also a fellow “Neo-Luddite” whose “critical, sometimes resistant, perspective on generative AI” I wholeheartedly share.

Her study into AI in charity content is fertile ground for insights into how “AI” is affecting sectors online and how people are trying to navigate the changes.  The study details how Organic Traffic is falling across the charity sector (in line with the rest of the internet), how many charities are seeing misinformation about their activities in AI and how they are adopting AI in light of these challenges.

If you’ve felt concerned about the impacts of AI in your own industry and want insights from elsewhere, Lauren’s insightful and easy to read study is a great place to find them.

Github surveyed its users over the summer “to establish a baseline measure of software developers’ climate change beliefs and risk perceptions, their views on AI’s environmental impact, their perceptions of software efficiency as a lever for sustainability, and their expectations for employers, cloud providers, governments, and GitHub in addressing environmental impact.”

The results are instructive and show that there is an appetite for less carbon intensive infrastructure and methodology among the developer community.

8 in 10 respondents acknowledged that Climate Change is real, although only 53% think it is wholly caused by human activities.

The majority of respondents believe that AI systems are contributing to climate change and 58% oppose building of data centers in their local area.

80% of respondents are interested in using tools that help them write more energy efficient code.

Welcome to the fight for a more Humane Web!

Digital accessibility specialists Tetralogical have released an open source accessible components library. They’ve gone above and beyond though also publishing their documentation, including the accessibility requirements, test scenarios, and even the working automated tests which validate each one.

The library currently includes code for Accordion, Breadcrumbs, Dialog, Disclosure, Pagination. Tabs, Text input and Textarea components, with applicable success criteria for WCAG 2.2 at levels A, AA and AAA. 

It’s really understandable, well documented and vitally important information for web developers everywhere.

This dashboard from the Sustainable AI group allows you to  estimate energy, carbon and water (coming soon) footprints of AI inference across a range of models and providers and compare the footprint of different tools.

This library of articles and resources was shared in a presentation from the Green Web Foundation I attended recently. It’s a treasure trove of information on the climate crisis and the role digital technology plays in it.

With topics like Climate Justice, Corporate Sustainability, Open Practices, Movement & Initiatives and Policy, it’s the perfect place to get educated (and possibly radicalised).