When Servers Meet Species: A Fab-to-Grave Lens on Computing's Biodiversity Impact

2025-06-25

AI Summary

Current sustainability research on computing systems predominantly focuses on carbon and water footprints, largely neglecting biodiversity impacts due to the absence of standardized quantification metrics and integrated modeling frameworks. Method: This paper introduces FABRIC—the first comprehensive, life-cycle (production–operation–end-of-life) assessment framework for biodiversity impacts of computing systems. It proposes two traceable, resource-coupled metrics: the Embodied Biodiversity Index (EBI) for hardware manufacturing and the Operational Biodiversity Index (OBI) for runtime impacts, jointly linking computational workloads to geographically resolved biodiversity loss via integrated resource consumption and ecological impact models. Contribution/Results: Empirical analysis demonstrates that biodiversity must be elevated as a core sustainability pillar alongside carbon and water. An open-source analytical toolkit enables green computing design and evidence-based policymaking, thereby addressing a critical gap in quantitative biodiversity assessment within sustainable computing research.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Other Foundations of Human Computation & AI
• Search and Optimization: Evolutionary Computation
• Computer Vision: Bias, Fairness & Privacy

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Sustainability and carbon-aware systems for Web, mobile, and WoT
• Responsible Web: Sustainability and climate impact of web technologies
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics

Abstract

Biodiversity loss is a critical planetary boundary, yet its connection to computing remains largely unexamined. Prior sustainability efforts in computing have focused on carbon and water, overlooking biodiversity due to the lack of appropriate metrics and modeling frameworks. This paper presents the first end-to-end analysis of biodiversity impact from computing systems. We introduce two new metrics--Embodied Biodiversity Index (EBI) and Operational Biodiversity Index (OBI)--to quantify biodiversity impact across the lifecycle, and present FABRIC, a modeling framework that links computing workloads to biodiversity impacts. Our evaluation highlights the need to consider biodiversity alongside carbon and water in sustainable computing design and optimization. The code is available at https://github.com/TianyaoShi/FABRIC.

Problem

• Examining computing's impact on biodiversity loss
• Developing metrics to quantify biodiversity impact in computing
• Linking computing workloads to biodiversity impacts via modeling

Innovation

• Introduces Embodied and Operational Biodiversity Indexes
• Develops FABRIC framework for biodiversity impact modeling
• Provides end-to-end biodiversity analysis for computing systems