Sustainability Gamification
Sustainability Gamification is a technique help organisations to realise their sustainability culture ambitions. It provides a type of interactive experience that aims to both educate people about sustainability issues, and motivate and guide them to act
Craig Palmer
Amazon Employee
Published Feb 27, 2024
Last Modified Sep 27, 2024
Through the daily news and sometimes first hand, the world is witnessing events links to climate change at a scale of destruction and devastation that is both new and frightening. These include heatwaves, floods, droughts, and fires. With the amount of carbon dioxide in the world’s atmosphere at the highest level seen in 3 million years, sustainability is increasingly recognised as a critical and integral aspect of businesses across various industries. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global temperature increases must stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid the worst effects of climate change on humans and our planet. At the present rate, global temperatures would reach 1.5°C around 2040.
One area where businesses can reduce their environmental impact, including the reduction of their carbon footprint, reducing embodied carbon, driving a circular economy and enabling sustainability for customers (more detail here) - is by deploying their IT workloads to the cloud. Research shows AWS customers can lower their workload carbon footprints by nearly 80% compared to on-premises workloads and up to 96% once AWS is powered with 100% renewable energy - a target AWS is on a path to meet by 2025. This is often referred to as Sustainability OF the cloud.
While renewable energy is good news for sustainability, it’s always better to avoid generating carbon where possible. For this reason, businesses like Amazon, have net zero carbon goals across their operations. One way businesses can actively contribute towards these goals is by applying sustainable cloud infrastructure design. By optimising your deployed infrastructure within the cloud to minimise your use of resources that contribute to environmental impact, then you are further improving your sustainability posture. One example of this is to decommission infrastructure such as development environments that are not being used during weekends. This is often referred to as Sustainability IN the Cloud.
Sustainability Gamification, the focus of this document, is an approach to help motivate, educate and guide your staff to drive your sustainability changes IN the cloud.
Sustainability optimisation is important for a range of reasons, not only for environmental responsibility, such as reducing carbon footprint, but also to help in several other areas. These can include driving cost savings, aligning with corporate social responsibility initiatives, attracting talented environmentally conscious staff, differentiating yourself in the market for consumers concerned about the environmental and social impacts of their purchasing decisions, and achieving possible future regulatory obligations. An example of these obligations is the agreed Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) in the EU requiring companies to adopt a plan ensuring their business model is compatible with the Paris agreement with fines and injunction measures for non-compliance.
Cost optimisation often drives business investment as returns can be readily realised. While initially, optimisations are more noticeable, regular and disciplined optimising for reduced operating spend may typically fail to be prioritised by software engineers and project managers who instead are more focused on the delivery of new functionality. In contrast, optimisations that lead to measurable carbon emission reductions and can be related to in a meaningful way leads to much greater interest and appreciation. Since cost provides a relationship proxy for sustainability (e.g. less computation requires less electricity), then encouraging a drive to improve sustainability can also greatly contribute to cost reduction goals.
Sustainability Gamification is type of interactive experience that aims to both educate people about sustainability issues, and motivate and guide them to act. It is unique in that it doesn’t just harness the innate calling of your staff to achieve better sustainability outcomes, but friendly competitive game-playing can further boost intrinsic motivation. There are several key elements to support this experience:
- Data and tooling to provide sustainability metrics: this needs to be both rapid and visible, and enable participants to understand past, current and the forecasted future state of the whole and parts of their sustainability posture.
- Goals, challenges, rewards and a sense of fairness: gaming should be a positive and inclusive experience for all regardless of capability. Challenges align gamification efforts with the broader sustainability agenda and these may vary widely to incorporate a range of roles and skills. They may also incorporate real-world interactions and potentially progression levels. Participants should have choice to suit their personal situation.
- Social engagement: drive collaboration and comradery with an interactive, personalised and user-friendly interface with leader boards that foster a sense of competition as well as a platform that allows participants to share their achievements and progress in their own narrative.
- Learning: play has always been a powerful tool for learning and most employers appreciate continuous enablement which could also apply to employee’s daily life. Gamification enables learning content to be personalised and adapted, encouraging cooperation, exchanging of ideas, and working together to solve problems.
- Freedom to fail: participants have the ability to experiment and fail without the fear of irreversible damage. For example, a challenge reward for an infrastructure improvement could be for a PoC outcome in an experiment account and not directly related to a production level change.
In 2023, AWS achieved its goal to match 100% of the electricity consumed across our operations with renewable energy. This means that while all electricity consumed by its data centres from the local electricity grid will still contribute to varying degrees of carbon emissions depending on the location (see Electricity Maps), investments in renewable energy in other locations produce equal or greater electricity with no carbon emissions. This includes the deployment of wind and solar farms. Subsequently, choosing a region with less carbon emissions means less offsetting is required (see here). This approach to carbon accounting is called Market-Based carbon reporting.
While investing in renewable energy is highly beneficial, avoiding emissions is better by tackling the problem at its source with more reliable, permanent, and systemic benefits. In the cloud, this can be achieved primarily in two ways:
- By choosing a lower carbon region according to the electricity maps reference above if this is possible (there may be data sovereignty restrictions)
- By optimising your cloud infrastructure use via GreenOps practices outlined further down.
Sustainability gamification is often about actions we can take to avoid or clean up pollution such as reducing the amount of carbon entering the atmosphere, and subsequently also being absorbed into the oceans. And these types of sustainability actions can often be gamified.
Sustainability Gamification is not just limited to the reduction of carbon emissions and their impact on global warming. For example, ocean pollution has broad detrimental effects ranging from ingestion, suffocation, and entanglement of wildlife species, to biodiversity loss and widespread ecosystem degradation. Microplastics, formed through the breakdown of plastic into smaller pieces, can enter the food chain, causing further environmental and health risks. While it is accepted that plastic does not biologically decompose (synthetic polymers are durable), millions of tonnes of plastic find their way into the ocean each year, accumulating in vast volumes with ever-increasing impact.
Gamification can be a great way help address this issue. Whether that involves an organised beach clean up, or an activity on the water that could, for example, be achieved from ocean-based freight (e.g. a competition between ships to collect discarded rubbish). As with any sustainability effort, every contribution, not matter how small, counts!
Every enterprise or organisation is going to be different and so gamification strategies will vary accordingly. Whether that involves the urban environment, forests and rivers, or providing education, if there is a desire to contribute to sustainability, then creatively designing relevant challenges is the next step.
GreenOps is a combination of a set of practices and principles that aligns technology operations with environmental goals to focus on monitoring and managing your IT infrastructure for not just the lowest possible cost, but also the lowest possible environmental impact.
By aligning sustainability gamification goals with GreenOps principles, it is possible to introduce the optimisation of cloud resource usage into your gamified environment. Participants can embark on challenges to determine ways to reduce their cloud workload's reliance on carbon emissions whether that is decommissioning unused resources or changing the resources such as moving to Graviton compute.
It is up to the customer to choose their preferred carbon tooling. Whether this is commercial, or opensource. Their choice will be driven by factors such as how they currently implement any existing dashboards. While these carbon tooling options rely on their own carbon calculation methodologies, combining these with other models, such as the EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator, can yield some interesting metrics. For example, carbon reduction could be approximated in terms of trees saved.
Being able to comprehend the gains of your changes as a measurement of trees, or even flights saved, can be more relatable to most people and therefore be more motivating. For example, a gamification challenge could award a prize to the team that plants the largest virtual forest or saves a flight to the moon!
While the approach above is unlikely to be accurate in terms of actual carbon emissions, in the context of sustainability and gamification, it needs to only be in the right direction. For example, in AWS, sustainability proxy metrics are an effective means for optimising for environmental impact as outlined below.
It is currently impractical to accurately model carbon emissions in real time. There are many fluctuating factors that impact carbon emissions such as the carbon load of the local electricity grid and the CPU/GPU load you are placing on the underlying compute infrastructure – both of which change frequently. Audited and reported carbon emission measurements are not published until well after the usage event. Sustainability proxy metrics offer an effective alternative to drive gamification.
Sustainability proxy metrics are indirect measurements that serve as proxies for understanding sustainability-related performance, like energy consumption and environmental impact. They generally focus on the reduction of the following (reference blogs and proxy metrics ref):
- Compute – e.g. vCPU hours
- Storage – e.g. GB provisioned
- Network – e.g. packets transferred
For a visual analysis, you can also access the Sustainability Proxy Metrics Dashboard (available from here with further guidance here), as part of the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards.
The intention is to reduce the environmental impact factors while maintaining necessary levels of business units of work. In a gamified environment, the aligned GreenOps goal could, for example, be to reduce the provisioned resources per unit of work by X%.
Gamification, including projects, leader boards and social interactions, is a complex concept and needs to be tailored to the needs of each enterprise. In the next blog part (watch this space), I will outline an approach to implementing sustainability gamification using these technologies:
- Backstage – a popular platform for building internal developer portals which has been accepted to CNCF (https://www.cncf.io/projects/backstage/). It provides a flexible way of presenting and engaging with users. Concepts of teams, metrics tracking, leader boards, projects and related documentation are core capabilities
- Harmonix - is an open source reference implementation that ties together AWS services and Backstage into an enterprise-ready offering (https://harmonixonaws.io/). It provides an effective means of deploying Backstage in a secure, reliable and scalable way whilst removing the complexity.
In this post, I’ve outlined the basis for sustainability gamification including the additional benefits, such as cost reductions, that help to inspire business investment. I also outlined the concept of sustainability proxy metrics and carbon emissions modelling as a way of measuring the impact of changes both visibly and rapidly which is key to effective gamification.
For further information about ways to optimise your workloads, please refer to Sustainable Software Development Life Cycle post as well as the AWS Well Architected Sustainability Pillar and the AWS re:Invent 2022 session Delivering sustainable, high-performing architectures
Any opinions in this post are those of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of AWS.