The world faces an unprecedented convergence of environmental, social, and economic challenges — and technology sits at the heart of both the problem and the solution. As global digital infrastructure expands, the IT sector now accounts for a significant and growing share of worldwide energy consumption and carbon emissions. Yet technology also holds extraordinary power to accelerate the transition to a more sustainable world, enabling smarter energy grids, more efficient supply chains, and data-driven emissions management and climate action at scale.
As a global consortium dedicated to developing open, vendor-neutral technology standards and best practices, The Open Group occupies a unique position in this landscape. The standards and best practices that we create and the architectures we promote shape how technology is designed, deployed, and governed across industries worldwide.
As a technology standards organization, our commitment to sustainability extends from making our internal operations more sustainable, to reaching a very broad audience through the important standards work that is being done in many of our Forums, Consortia, and Work Groups, including on environmental footprints (Open Footprint® Forum), on positioning small scale nuclear as an emissions-reducing alternative for heat and power generation in industry (Industrial Advanced Nuclear™ Consortium), and on architecting sustainable ICT systems (Architecture Forum, TOGAF® Series Guide: Environmentally Sustainable ICT Systems).
Our commitment to making our internal operations more sustainable led us to form an internal sustainability team in 2024, and to the creation our first sustainability plan in 2026 (download our sustainability plan). Our sustainability team assessed the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and has put a priority on the following as being most relevant for The Open Group:
- SDG 3 – Good Health and Well-Being
- SDG 4 – Quality Education
- SDG 7 – Affordable and Clean Energy
- SDG 9 – Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
- SDG 10 – Reduced Inequalities
- SDG 12 – Responsible Consumption and Production
- SDG 13 – Climate Action
Our sustainability efforts will initially focus on developing best practices guidance for staff, establishing training and awareness opportunities, creating an ESG framework, reviewing internal policies for social appropriateness, and planning for implementation of the Open Footprint Data Model for our own emissions data management.