https://lancaster-university.github.io/loco2026
The carbon footprint of ICT is rising despite the urgent need to decarbonise society and to stay within planetary boundaries. The operational and embodied carbon emissions from ICT are already estimated to contribute between 2 to 3 percent of the global emissions and new technologies such as AI is driving overall growth in data centre demand, which globally rivals that of entire nations. This growth in emissions from computing is unsustainable and alternative low emissions pathways for computing are urgently needed.
The LOCO workshop provides a forum for radical ideas, early work, and critical perspectives that aims to reduce the emissions from computing.
COORDINATES
10–11 September, 2026
Lancaster, UK
TOPICS OF INTEREST
- Measurements, testbeds, and simulation
- carbon footprint estimation methodologies for compute resources and software systems
- testbeds for sustainable and low carbon computing methods (e.g. co-simulation of computing and energy systems, hybrid testbeds, emulation)
- carbon impacts of data collection, retention, and replication
- open datasets and methods challenges for ICT carbon reporting
- Sustainable software engineering
- practices and tools for low carbon and sustainable software engineering
- illustrative case studies and experience reports from sustainable software engineering
- Energy efficiency
- energy-efficient programming languages and compilers (e.g. resource-aware type systems, low-overhead language implementations, energy-efficient compilation to heterogeneous systems)
- energy-efficiency of applications, e.g. green AI/ML, big data analytics, search
- Hardware efficiency
- long lived systems design, addressing obsolescence
- cloud computing and virtualisation techniques to efficiently share compute resources
- edge computing and other locality-aware approaches to reduce resource usage, energy consumption, and carbon emissions
- load balancing, resource allocation, scheduling and placement, as well as other compute resource management mechanisms to improve resource usage
- Carbon awareness
- carbon-aware and grid-aware load migration, time shifting, and scaling mechanisms
- energy-efficient and carbon-aware networking
- carbon-aware data centre design and operation
- Embodied carbon and circular economy
- methods for extending the useful life of compute resources (e.g. reliable monitoring and early-warning systems for long-living hardware)
- low-carbon and sustainable data storage and caching
- circular economy: compute resource reuse and recycling
- Frugal computing and other low footprint paradigms
- frugality/sufficiency, demand reduction, degrowth computing
- human-computer interaction that encourages considerate use of ultimately limited computing resources
- sociological and economical aspects of low-carbon computing, e.g. end-user involvement, business models
- case studies of “doing less computing”
- Computing for climate science, other scientific computing, and energy informatics
- effective programming and efficient execution of software for climate science
- sustainable scientific computing and workflow management
- methods and tools for forecasting weather and energy availability.
IMPORTANT DATES
-8 May 2026 (AOE) – Submission (Extended abstracts, Workshop presentations, Lightning talks)
-5 June 2026 – Notification of acceptance for Extended abstracts and Workshop presentations
-19 June 2026 – Notification of acceptance for Lightning talks
-26 June 2025 – Revised final camera-ready papers
-10-11 September 2026 – Workshop
FURTHER DETAILS