A common Drupal saying is "Come for the software, stay for the community". Our environmental footprint has many facets. It isn’t just the code, but how the community maintains and extends the code. Every line of code takes energy to execute, energy to write, and likely represents a combination of communications efforts to nail down.
Our Software
The Drupal community cares about sustainability. We acknowledge that our work exists only within the finite carrying capacity of our planet. Drupal runs on over a million websites, so our code has a measurable contribution to the energy consumption of the web. Every additional line of code has the potential to have impacts on our collective energy consumption. We know that the internet will be powered by renewable energy. Decisions made by the Drupal community are magnified thousands if not millions of times as assumptions are rolled out across the internet.
Drupal drives about 2% of the web. The internet is responsible for about 2% of global CO2 emissions. Reducing the page weight of Drupal Core will eventually reduce the impact of over a million sites. It is a tiny step in the total reductions that are needed, but at this stage, all efforts help.
How We Work
Sustainability is important to the Drupal community. Dries himself has had a long-standing interest and has created a terrific project building a personal solar web hosting server.
Much of our work is virtual and done through Zoom and Slack, but it is important for our community to get together in Drupal Camps and DrupalCons around the world. Many of these are organized by small community volunteers. Increasingly we are seeing sustainability factor into organizing initiatives of both big and small events. With thousands of people travelling to DrupalCons every year, this has a huge impact. Having a European & North American DrupalCon has probably reduced the number of trans-Atlantic flights.
Drupal is largely produced on Drupal.org which (along with the subdomains) has over a million pages. The main site, Drupal.org, uses a CDN service, which is not powered by renewable energy. Running the Website Carbon Calculator against a collection of pages indicates that between 0.17 and 1.91 grams of CO2 is produced every time someone visits a Drupal.org page. Drupal.org itself is hosted on a combination of the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, and AWS. There is much work to be done to improve the home page and many landing pages of the site. Drupal uses GitLab for their development lifecycle, and it is encouraging to see their work on Environmental Sustainability.
More information is available about sustainability in community from our handbook.
The Drupal Association
The Drupal Association does not at this point measure or estimate the Scope 1, 2, & 3 CO2 emissions. The small staff and board events do have an CO2 impact, but it is largely through organizing annual events and the use of Drupal.org. Buying Carbon Offsets or Carbon Credits has been suggested to DrupalCon participants in the past.
Digital Sustainability Standards
The Drupal community is aware of the growing list of environmental standards for Information Communications Technology. Increasingly, organizations are being asked to account for their CO2 emissions. Legislation like the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and California's Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act (SB 253) are forcing organizations to do carbon accounting. This involves accounting for the digital footprint.
The W3C now has a Sustainable Web Design W3C Interest Group with a working draft of the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG). This work draws on and references a range of other standards for digital technology.
UN Sustainable Development Goals
The Drupal community supports the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. We see Climate Action (13) as an area where we can act and have a greater impact. We also see open source software as a means of Responsible Consumption and Production (12). Engagement in the open source community is also a way to spread Decent Work and Economic Growth (8). Our community is working to reduce Gender Inequality (5) and Reduce Inequality (10). We also see providing our code and discussions as contributing to Quality Education (4).
Continuing our commitment to the SDGs, Drupal is now officially a Digital Public Good (DPG). Our community applied to the Digital Public Goods Alliance's (DPGA) DPG Registry, and were approved. Digital Public Goods are ones which create a more equitable world and help attain the United Nation’s SDGs. DPGs represent an opportunity for everyone to access cutting edge features, drive their own digital transformation, and grow local ecosystems. As open source solutions, DPGs can be the basis for community building, knowledge sharing, and joint approaches. Local adaptations and iterations can be shared back with Drupal to help continuously improve it and ensure its long term sustainability. All digital public goods meet the DPG Standard.
