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# One year of the CO2-challenge – insights and lessons learned

Aydin reveals that idle test environments emit more carbon than production workloads. Discover how scaling non-production servers to zero instantly cuts your software emissions by half.

- **Speakers:** [Aydin Mir Mohammadi](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@aydin-mir-mohammadi)
- **Event:** World Congress 2026 Europe
- **Published:** July 10, 2026
- **Duration:** 29:29
- **URL:** https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100251-one-year-of-the-co2-challenge-insights-and-lessons-learned

## Summary

The regional Karlsruhe CO2 Challenge empowered over 20 IT companies to reduce software emissions by 40% within a year. The digital sector accounts for roughly 4% of global carbon output—exceeding the aviation industry—yet the underlying problem stems not directly from software, but from hardware embodied carbon and energy intensity. Interestingly, when organizations kick off green initiatives, development leads are often the biggest skeptics. Assuming their code is already optimized for performance, tech teams initially overlook sustainability as an entirely separate axis of systemic optimization.

The most impactful realization from the challenge was that non-production systems—dev, test, and staging environments—often account for more carbon emissions than actual production workloads. Because these replica environments are traditionally left running 24/7, organizations can instantly cut 30% to 50% of their emissions simply by spinning them down during off-hours. Aydin compares modern IT infrastructure to buying a massive car for a once-a-year vacation, leaving the engine running while parked, and forcing a second backup car to follow closely behind for failover. Prioritizing measures via an Eisenhower matrix quickly highlights these scale-to-zero practices as high-value, low-effort wins.

Executing these scale-down strategies often reveals localized infrastructure bottlenecks. While US hyperscalers provide simple APIs to manage virtual machines, organizations relying on local data centers for digital sovereignty repeatedly face manual ticketing systems, forcing providers to build custom virtual switches to enable dynamic usage. Beyond infrastructure right-sizing, companies can adopt carbon-aware computing practices. By leveraging tools like Hangfire and the Carbon Aware Computing scheduling APIs, developers can delay non-critical computational jobs until the energy grid is saturated with renewable power, achieving greener execution without fundamentally altering core application logic.

**Keywords:** green software engineering, carbon-aware computing, software carbon emissions, scale-to-zero architecture, non-production environment optimization, infrastructure over-provisioning, dynamic scaling bottlenecks, digital sovereignty infrastructure, hangfire job scheduling, CO2 challenge, renewable energy workload shifting, eisenhower matrix prioritization, data center API limitations, VM utilization efficiency

## Chapters

1. **Evaluating the global digital carbon footprint** (00:03) — The digital sector accounts for four percent of global emissions, surpassing both the aviation and shipping industries.
1. **Launching a local initiative for climate-friendly software** (01:58) — A regional network challenges software companies to reduce their operational carbon footprint by forty percent in a single year.
1. **Tracking company adoption and executive management commitment** (04:25) — Analyzing how executive backing yields a one-third successful execution rate among participating technology organizations.
1. **Understanding the hardware foundations of software emissions** (06:10) — Software indirectly generates carbon through hardware manufacturing processes and continuous electricity consumption across data centers.
1. **Building an implementation strategy for green software** (07:37) — Engineering teams utilize brainstorming and prioritization matrices to identify and act on carbon reduction hotspots.
1. **Overcoming resistance from senior engineering and development leads** (09:49) — Technical leads often block sustainability efforts because they mistakenly equate existing performance efficiency with optimized carbon consumption.
1. **Addressing the carbon waste of fixed hardware provisioning** (12:00) — Replacing static compute allocations with dynamic scaling reduces physical hardware waste and associated carbon footprints.
1. **Mitigating the hidden carbon costs of non-production environments** (13:36) — Shutting down constantly running test and staging systems presents the largest opportunity for immediate carbon savings.
1. **Reviewing real environmental savings from challenge participants** (17:24) — Participating companies significantly reduced their infrastructure footprint by implementing strict operational schedules for non-production environments.
1. **Navigating API limitations in sovereign local data centers** (19:12) — Organizations prioritizing digital sovereignty struggle to dynamically scale infrastructure without access to proprietary hyperscaler APIs.
1. **Reducing network payload for large digital website portfolios** (21:46) — Optimizing simple digital templates across thousands of deployments massively cuts down network-bound carbon emissions.
1. **Implementing carbon-aware computing for asynchronous background tasks** (23:25) — Shifting background jobs to align with high renewable grid energy minimizes the operational footprint using flexible scheduling plugins.
1. **Embedding sustainability advocates within product development groups** (27:17) — Enforcing dedicated sustainability roles within engineering teams ensures that long-term green computing practices genuinely succeed.

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