Design for Environmental Sustainability in Computing | 23 532

Opportunity Information: Apply for 23 532

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Design for Environmental Sustainability in Computing (DESC) program is a discretionary grant opportunity focused on reducing the environmental footprint of computing across its full lifecycle, from initial design and manufacturing to deployment and operation, and finally to maintenance, reuse, recycling, and disposal. DESC is built around the idea that the biggest environmental harms from computing are not limited to electricity used during runtime. It emphasizes that manufacturing and supply chains can carry major "embodied" impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions, heavy resource consumption (such as rare earth elements), and toxic byproducts, and that these can sometimes outweigh the emissions and energy associated with operating a system over its entire usable life. The program also highlights real-world effects from computing infrastructure, such as data center heat management that can affect local ecosystems and power capacity constraints that can stress regional grids.

DESC encourages research that treats environmental sustainability as a primary design objective on the same level as performance, security, reliability, and energy efficiency, and it seeks solutions that operate across all layers of the computing stack. This includes hardware and network architecture design, operating systems and middleware, programming languages and compilers, algorithms, data management, and workflow choices that influence provisioning, utilization, and system lifetimes. The solicitation makes clear that seemingly "software-only" decisions can still have substantial environmental consequences by driving hardware refresh cycles, overprovisioning, inefficient utilization, and shortened useful life of equipment, all of which increase the need for additional manufacturing and ultimately increase e-waste burdens.

A central expectation of DESC proposals is that they move beyond narrow energy-efficiency metrics to pursue a broader set of measurable environmental outcomes. Projects are expected to consider, quantify, and ideally improve metrics such as greenhouse gas emissions, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), use and disposal of scarce or hazardous materials, heat, wastewater, recyclability, and longevity, including how tradeoffs among these metrics might play out. The solicitation seeks "new and measurably different" approaches, with an overarching ambition of holistic, order-of-magnitude improvements in the environmental sustainability of computing rather than incremental gains focused only on power consumption.

The program also calls for research that supports practical decision making and accountability around sustainability. That includes tools and methods for assessing environmental impacts throughout the lifecycle, techniques for managing rapidly growing datasets and workloads more sustainably, and modeling and methodologies that help organizations and end users make better choices about adoption, operation, maintenance, repurposing, and end-of-life handling of computing systems. In other words, DESC is not just about inventing more efficient components; it is also about enabling better system-level and organizational behavior that reduces total environmental burden by extending lifetimes, avoiding unnecessary new manufacturing, and improving reuse and recycling outcomes.

In terms of fit, DESC is explicit about what it will not fund. Proposals that are purely about performance improvements or conventional energy efficiency (without a broader environmental sustainability frame and metrics) are considered out of scope. Likewise, projects that primarily use computing as a tool to improve sustainability in other sectors (for example, applying AI to optimize agriculture or transportation emissions) are not the target of this program; DESC is about making computing itself more environmentally sustainable. Finally, while sustainability is often described as having environmental, economic, and social pillars, DESC is specifically focused on environmental sustainability. Proposals aimed solely at economic or social sustainability outcomes, without a strong environmental sustainability contribution, are not aligned with the solicitation.

Key grant details included in the opportunity information are that it is an NSF grant (Funding Opportunity Number 23-532) in the Science and Technology and other Research and Development activity category (CFDA 47.070). The solicitation anticipated approximately 18 awards, with an award ceiling of $2,000,000 for Type III projects. The opportunity was originally posted December 15, 2022, with an original closing date of March 17, 2023, and eligibility was listed as "Others" with additional clarification referenced in the full eligibility text.

• The National Science Foundation in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Design for Environmental Sustainability in Computing" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 47.070.
• This funding opportunity was created on Dec 15, 2022.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Mar 17, 2023 Type III projects. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $2,000,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 18 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).

Apply for 23 532

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