2nd International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing (loco2026)

Call for Papers

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 globally significant and new technologies such as AI is driving overall growth especially in data centres, which globally rivals that of entire nations. This growth is unsustainable and alternative low footprint pathways for computing are urgently needed.

The LOCO workshop provides an interdisciplinary forum for radical ideas, early work, and critical perspectives that aims to reduce the emissions from computing.

We invite researchers and practitioners across research areas and application domains to take part and contribute to our workshop. The main focus is on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from computing, including but not limited to low energy and energy efficiency; recognising the need for long lived low footprint systems, and computing’s wider role in amplifying climate impacts in other societal systems.

We welcome submissions that describe new ideas and visions, just as much as papers describing ongoing work, completed projects, and practical tools. We welcome critical and disciplinary perspectives and insights on established pathways and emerging trends involving low carbon computing; as well as hopeful trajectories that can galvanise our community.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest for LOCO 2026 include but are not limited to:

• 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

Submission and Review Process

The workshop offers two submission formats: talks, based on paper submissions, and lightning talks, selected based on short abstracts. Reviewing will be non-blind: authors should include their names, affiliations, and contact information, and reviews will include reviewer names.

Talks: full workshop papers

We adopt a single-stage submission and review process. Authors submit a full paper of up to 5 pages, with length appropriate to contribution, this to include all content (figures, tables, and references).

All submissions will be peer reviewed by the programme committee based on originality, relevance to the workshop scope, quality, and potential to stimulate discussion. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop (in person or online) and will be included in the workshop proceedings.

Lightning talks: short abstracts

In addition to regular talks, there will be a ‘lightning talk’ session with talks of no more than five minutes — back-to-back.

Authors submit a short abstract of no more than 1 page (plus references). These will be reviewed separately from the full papers, and the review criteria are more relaxed. Short abstracts of accepted lightning talks will be included in the workshop proceedings unless authors choose to omit them.

Submission info and template

All papers should be original work by the authors and use the ACM sigconf double-column format. Please remove the ACM copyright information and CCS concepts. You can find useful instructions on how to remove the ACM branding from the sample-sigconf.tex source code on the website of the LIMITs workshops.

All papers will be made freely available on our website. The copyright will remain with the authors. However, we are encouraging workshop paper authors to include a CC license statement in their paper. Authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit their paper on arXiv, to be included in the arXiv-based Proceedings.

Initial submissions should be made via EasyChair.

Use of AI and LLMs

In line with our charter’s environmental sustainability remit, we expect authors to take steps to minimise the footprint of the production of work submitted to loco2026. This includes no unnecessary or profligate use of AI and LLMs such as ChatGPT in the production of papers.

If AI is used, then steps should be taken to use AI with the smallest footprint possible. LLMs should not be used to generate portions of the paper, and should not be listed as co-authors. Word processing systems that recommend and insert replacement text, perform spelling or grammar checks, or enable non-native speakers to translate text, where AI use cannot necessarily be avoided are exceptions.