As we celebrate Earth Day 2026, what is the technical community—the people who actually build and operate the Internet—doing about climate and environmental sustainability?
The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the organization responsible for developing and maintaining the open standards that make the Internet work. And as part of that work, the IETF community has turned its attention to energy efficiency and environmental sustainability as areas where technical standards can make a difference.
There are two groups within the IETF ecosystem doing particularly important work in this space: the GREEN Working Group (launched in 2024) and the SUSTAIN Research Group (launched in early 2025).
The GREEN Working Group: Getting Ready for Energy-Efficient Networking
The GREEN Working Group has a name that says exactly what it does: “Getting Ready for Energy-Efficient Networking.” Its goal is to give network operators the standardized tools they need to actually measure, monitor, and manage the energy consumption of their networks.
That might sound like something that should already exist. It doesn’t—at least not in any standardized, interoperable way. Right now, if you’re a network operator who wants to understand how much energy your routers, switches, and other equipment are consuming, you’re largely on your own. Different vendors report energy metrics differently. There’s no common set of data models that let you query a device and get back comparable, meaningful numbers.
The GREEN Working Group is working to fix that. It is focused on developing YANG data models—a structured way of describing network data—that will allow operators to monitor energy usage at the component level, the device level, and across an entire network.
The group is also working on common terminology and definitions for energy efficiency metrics, so that when one vendor says “energy object” and another says “power consumption unit,” everyone is talking about the same thing.
At IETF 125 in Shenzhen
The GREEN Working Group made updates across all of its core documents. It also made progress on the terminology draft (adding new terms like “energy object” and “energy saving”), the use cases document (which gained a new use case around cross-layer energy saving), and the overall framework draft.
The group also discussed how to move its work forward and specifically how to model power states. The group also received new proposals for using IPFIX telemetry to correlate traffic patterns with energy consumption, and for an application programming interface (API) approach to provide visibility into energy consumption along specific network paths.
The SUSTAIN Research Group: The Bigger Picture
While GREEN is focused on the engineering work of building specific standards, the SUSTAIN Research Group is operating at a higher level.
SUSTAIN—short for “Sustainability and the Internet”—is part of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), the research arm of the IETF community. Where working groups produce standards, research groups explore longer-term challenges and questions that don’t yet have clear answers.
SUSTAIN’s scope is genuinely broad. The goal as stated in the charter is “to contribute to the advancement of the Internet as a fundamental part of sustainable and resilient societies and the planet, through conceptual and evidence-based multi-disciplinary research collaboration.”
The group is exploring the full lifecycle of Internet infrastructure—not just operational energy consumption, but manufacturing, supply chains, and end-of-life disposal.
It’s looking at what it means for the Internet to operate within environmental limits. It’s investigating the social and economic dimensions of sustainability alongside the environmental ones. And it’s trying to develop the evidence-based, multi-disciplinary research that the standards community will need to make better decisions in the years ahead.
One important framing that SUSTAIN uses is the distinction between the Internet’s “footprint” (its negative environmental impacts) and its “handprint” (the positive sustainability outcomes it enables for the rest of society). Both matter, and understanding the relationship between them requires exactly the kind of rigorous, cross-disciplinary research that SUSTAIN is designed to support.
At IETF 125 in Shenzhen
SUSTAIN showcased the range of research the group is catalyzing. Researchers from the University of Oslo presented work toward a sub-national carbon map that could support carbon-aware routing and smarter placement of Internet infrastructure. A presentation from the iCoSys Institute examined testbed-based methodologies for measuring server lifecycle impacts, including the energy consumed by hardware components.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking session came from the University of Oxford, where a researcher presented work on “The Small World Web of AI“—exploring how edge AI and on-device content generation might trade transmission energy for compute energy, with complex implications for how we think about Internet efficiency.
The group also discussed SHAPE (Sustainability Holistic API for Path Energy Evaluation), a proposed API for measuring energy consumption along specific network paths.
Getting Involved
If these topics matter to you, the good news is that both groups are open to participation.
The IETF runs on the principle that anyone can contribute, and both GREEN and SUSTAIN actively welcome new voices—whether you’re a network engineer, a researcher, or simply someone who cares deeply about these questions.
The easiest way to get started is to join the mailing lists:
You can also browse the archives of both lists to get a feel for the ongoing discussions before jumping in. And if you want to go deeper, both groups publish their meeting materials, Internet-Drafts, and minutes publicly on the IETF Datatracker.
The Internet is not separate from the climate crisis—it’s deeply embedded in it, both as a source of environmental impact and as one of our most powerful tools for addressing that impact. The people working inside these IETF and IRTF groups understand that, and they’re doing the technical work that could make a meaningful difference.
On this Earth Day, that feels worth celebrating—and worth joining.
Image © NASA