How Sustainable Development Goals Will Guide the Future of Web Development

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030. Since then, the world has seen an unprecedented rise in the importance of sustainability in every aspect of our lives, including web development.

Sustainable web development is a critical aspect of achieving the goals and I think it’s high time that we will explore the ways in which SDGs will guide the future of web development and the IT sector as a whole.

But first, what is Sustainable Web Development?

Sustainable web development is an approach to web development that takes into consideration the environmental, social, and economic impacts of web projects. It involves designing and developing websites and web applications that are energy-efficient, accessible, and environmentally friendly. Sustainable web development is based on the principles of sustainability, which aim to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Web development has a significant impact on the environment, as data centers and web servers consume vast amounts of energy. In addition, the internet itself, all the switches and cabling, draws power like there is no tomorrow. Each node power consumption is miniscule but seen as a whole that number is staggering.

So, which goals can we as web designers, architects and developers work directly with? And what can we do in a more practical sense? Let’s take a closer look at some of them.

Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy

SDG 7 aims to ensure universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy by 2030.

As web developers we can contribute to achieving this goal by designing energy-efficient websites and web applications with technology that is already readily available today.

By optimizing our code base, reducing the size of images and videos, and using web hosting services that run on renewable energy we can have a direct impact. And by using modern and minimalistic frameworks like SvelteJS and SolidJS in our next project this impact is increased ten fold. It turns out that there are environment friendly frameworks!

Goal 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure

SDG 9 aims to build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialization, and foster innovation.

This goal covers a lot of ground. Innovation is a key driving force, I think, for the whole web sector and as such it’s something that we need to keep up and direct to have the climate and our carbon footprint in mind.

The infrastructure part is complex and could very well become its own blog post. But the simple answer is that we should strive to use the cloud and a cloud native approach as much as possible. By paying only for what you need you tend to only use as much as you have to.

The cloud and even more so, the edge, tends to lessen the carbon footprint by leaps and bounds. By leaving a traditional setup you can reduce your impact on the climate with as much as 80 - 90%, which is huge.

Web developers can further contribute to achieving this goal by using sustainable technologies and techniques in web development. For example, using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) can help reduce the energy consumption of web servers, and using Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) can help reduce the data usage of web applications.

Caching information and serving it closer to the user will help the unnecessary round trips back and forth to the server. We often want locally produced products. We should ask no less of our data.

Goal 17: Partnerships for the Goals

SDG 17 aims to strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.

This is one of the most important ones and probably the hardest to achieve. To contribute to achieving this goal we need to start collaborating with other stakeholders to promote sustainable web development and sustainable web architecture. And since tech is simple and human interaction, and just getting along, is hard this is a monumental task.

This goal can be achieved if we start sharing knowledge and best practices, and by working together to develop sustainable technologies and techniques as a community. This is already happening of course as a part of the global and active open source community. But to really accelerate and break through we must start talking about this issue on an industry level. The whole tech sector must get behind it and we need to start talking wider and more broadly about the subject.

In conclusion, to summarize, sustainable web development is an essential aspect of achieving the SDGs. By designing and developing with our carbon footprint in mind and using modern techniques and cloud based offerings we can greatly reduce our impact on the climate. And maybe, maybe, we can reach the high set and lofty goals before 2030. Let’s keep on trying.