# TAG Environmental Sustainability Proposal

## Introduction

The Paris Climate Accords outline the link between economic activity, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and the impacts of climate change. GHG emissions, primarily made from Carbon Dioxide, are released during the combustion of fossil fuels to produce electricity. To reach net zero goals, we need to identify how to reduce the environmental footprints of increasingly large data centers.

## Mission Statement
This TAG's goal is to advocate for, develop, support, and help evaluate environmental sustainability initiatives in Cloud Native Technologies.

All activities of this TAG should aim to positively impact the community by changing mindset, increasing resource efficiency, and putting energy efficiency and environmental sustainability on everyone's agenda.

## Responsibilities & Deliverables

### Background
We recognize that:
- balancing resource consumption with the desire for performance is difficult
- there is inconsistency in how emissions are calculated and what is included by software in scopes of emission.

### In-Scope

- Identify, define, and develop tooling to assess and improve environmental sustainability approaches, including
- quantification of energy consumption of full-stack software including application, cloud native services
- recommendations to manage full-stack software such that the overall energy consumption and associated carbon are reduced.
- items to evaluate technological and architectural health of projects
- Community outreach on any items within scope, for instance, social media/conferences/podcasts/meetups et cetera
- Collaboration with other sustainability efforts

Note that we have limited resources so may not be able to address every project.

### Out of scope
- Form an umbrella organization beyond the CNCF
- Establish a compliance and standards body beyond the CNCF space
- Evaluate individual company infrastructures
- Focus outside of Cloud Native Technologies, according to the [CNCF Cloud Native definition](https://github.com/cncf/toc/blob/main/DEFINITION.md)

## Deliverables to ToC
- landscape for the carbon and energy metrics/measurements/management savings
- recommendations for new CNCF projects where there are clear use cases or where exploration is needed
- regular reporting to ToC on ongoing and completed work
- recommend projects for sandbox and graduation status
- suggestions for improvements for CNCF internal processes, for example, education for sustainability

#### Audiences

- Education - audience is end users, developers, stakeholders
- Project intelligence - audience is TOC / TOC Community
- External collaboration - organizations with the same mindset

#### Execution & Focus

- How do we spell out CNCF “work items” that can be executed by both CNCF staff and the TOC community
- Can the TOC ask questions of the SIGs? “Go ruminate on this please”
- Make sure recommendations don’t over-determine users’ tech choices. For reference, the storage WG was successful because it provided genuine guidance about a *range* of approaches in a way that is transparent, unbiased, actionable

#### Operations

Security TAG operations are consistent with standard TAG operating guidelines provided by the [CNCF Technical Oversight Committee TOC](https://github.com/cncf/toc).

## Acknowledgement
The format of this proposal is inspired from [TAG security](https://github.com/cncf/tag-security/blob/main/governance/charter.md#operations).
The initial doc was taken from the [Environmental WG charter](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JaF7lSUmLQ2zmScmca6UF7PgbjMzSxjhhjx2LThThaY/edit#heading=h.x77xxicolnig) and modified by the community.

## Contributors
This proposal is contributed by (in alphabetical order):
- Cara Delia
- Chen Wang
- Debra Bernstein
- Eun Kyung Lee
- Fanjing Meng
- Frederick F. Kautz IV
- Huamin Chen
- Jiaju Zhang
- Jochen Joswig
- Jorge Palma
- Leonard Pahlke
- Mark Butcher
- Marlow Weston
- Max Körbächer
- Niki Manoledaki
- Parul Singh
- Scott Rigby
- Tony Mongkolsmai
- William Caban
- Wojtek Cichoń
- Yassine El Ghali