2025 – Year in Review

After our yearly celebration event, our Year in Review presentation and recording are now public!

Why CAT remains important

Climate action at work and in tech is evolving and new topics have been emerging in our community. Both at the personal and at the company level, CATs are talking about #repair and #open-source to extend the life of devices and become independent from Big Tech. Secondly, AI is everywhere and the priority of building and selling AI is making it harder to get stuff done in Green Teams.

CAT remains a space outside of work where we can question things, try new stuff, and support each other in climate action.

2025 highlights

Projects to enable connection

Enabling connections stats slide from the Year in Review presentation

On Slack #3-questions-and-ideas channel host Chris launched monthly themes to encourage conversations. This month’s theme is reflection and CATs are sharing practices that help them stay focussed as well as conversations/resources in the community that had the biggest impact on them this year. Join the conversation

For our #cat-roulette program (learn more) channel hosts Aram and Brett have also introduced themed rounds. So far CATs talked about climate careers, AI, and most recently we’ve also been reflecting on the year in our #cat-roulette matches.

We ran over 30 events this year! Highlights included…

Responsible AI event series: We gathered online and in-person to explore what it means to design responsibly with AI. CAT volunteer Paolo summarised the first workshop on our blog.

CAT book club: We read Digital Degrowth, Insolvent, and Moral Ambition. Help choose our next read and join the conversation in #cat-book-club

CAT systems series: With workshops and conversations we zoomed out to a systems thinking level – mapping the current reality with causal loop diagrams, designing interventions and tackling wicked problems. Check out the blog post summaries from these events or join the conversation in #cat-systems-series

CAT at Green IO: CATs joined the Green IO conferences in London, New York, and Paris and we also co-hosted the first ever hybrid talk: A day in the carbon life of an LLM prompt

Local meet-ups: In Switzerland CATs organised another Hackathon this year and they are gathering regularly for informal in-person meet-ups. Join #local-switzerland to see details for the next meet-up. A new online gathering has also started for folks based in #local-india!

Projects to developed a shared understanding within and beyond CAT

Developing a shared understanding stats slide from the Year in Review presentation

This year we published the #EcoWeb report (download here) – the final outcome of a project that emerged organically in 2023. The report covers the work of 31 CATs who analysed the carbon footprint of 507 websites of organisations focussed on sustainability.

CAT volunteers Elisa and Jon brought conversations from our #climate-careers channel to our blog with climate career stories.

CAT volunteer Maggie has been ensuring that our newsletter filled with community news, events, podcasts, news highlights, and job listings goes out weekly to our 6,000 subscribers. This year we also automated some of our processes to make it easier for new volunteers to get involved. You can subscribe to our newsletter here or view our archive here.

And lastly, CAT volunteer Sid has been raising awareness on LinkedIn by sharing events and blog posts. You can follow CAT on LinkedIn here.

CAT structure updates

This year we welcomed in two new organisers

Eugene – tech organiser – has contributed to automation, migrating to free and open source software and self-hosted tools, developing a Slack bot and dashboard to help us track our community health, and introduced OKRs to our planning process.

Heather – event organiser – has re-joined the team to revitalise and expand CAT hosted and CAT sponsored events. She introduced our Responsible AI programme and her focus for next year is on developing an events team structure to ensure CAT volunteers and members can easily run events.

We also established our CAT Assembly which is a decision-making group that represents the general CAT community.

And we joined the Green Software Foundation to bring the wealth of our community knowledge into conversations with the larger enterprise community.

Member projects

Beyond official CAT projects our members take action in many ways to make the tech industry more sustainable. See what CATs were up to in our member PAWS (Projects, Actions, Wins, and Stuff we learned at CAT) presentation

Shout-outs

We are a 100% volunteer-run community and we couldn’t do this work without our volunteers. A big thank you to everyone who volunteered this year as well as our Assembly members.

And a big thank you to those who supported us financially this year with recurring or one-off donations via Open Collective. Your donations pay for the software we use (e.g. Zoom for events) as well as our Mini Grants.

What did you think of CAT in 2025?

Let us know by filling out our member survey!

Goals for 2026

In 2026 we want to expand our impact and we’re planning to…

Develop leaders in CAT

Activate CAT members to participate and take action

Push the industry

Help us achieve our goals in 2026

Move from dormant seed to active sprout with these easy actions

Become an active community member by…

…starting and/or contributing to conversations on Slack and at events

…connecting to other CATs for meaningful dialogue or collaboration

…sharing knowledge, your lived experience, and/or resources

…highlighting any Community Principles or Code of Conduct violations

…taking climate action in your role (be that through greening your craft, speaking up, or advocating and influencing) and sharing back with the community

…sharing ideas for improving the community in #6-cat-community-feedback

Donate via Open Collective

Give feedback and share ideas for improving the community in our member survey

Take root & expand your branches by increasing your involvement

Become a volunteer

Apply for a mini grant (learn more about mini grants)

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