They do show that many developers are thinking about the environmental effects of the systems they build and use
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When asked questions that also appeared in Yale’s nationally representative Climate Change in the American Mind survey, GitHub users expressed greater concern about climate change than U.S. adults overall.
Key facts
- That is the central finding from a new survey of 1,039 GitHub users conducted by GitHub and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
- Eight in 10 respondents said they were interested in tools that help them write more energy-efficient code
- Only 10% of respondents said the way they develop and write software has a large effect on reducing their personal environmental impact
- Respondents asked for help estimating the footprint of repositories and CI/CD workflows, finding unnecessary GitHub Actions runs, improving code efficiency, and comparing AI use with other sources
Summary
Developers know efficient software matters, but many lack a clear way to find waste, measure an improvement, and make the case for fixing it. That is the central finding from a new survey of 1,039 GitHub users conducted by GitHub and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. There is an opportunity to turn that interest into normal engineering work: identify unnecessary compute, propose a change, test it, and let maintainers decide what ships. The survey, drawn from GitHub monthly active users in the United States, asked about climate change, AI, software efficiency, and the responsibilities of organizations across the technology sector. 71% said they were concerned about the environmental impact of AI systems, including their energy and water use and carbon emissions.