2026 Climate Weeks: W3C and Web Sustainability

The mission of the W3C Sustainable Web Interest Group is to improve digital sustainability so that the Web works better for all people and the planet. We are developing Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) to provide actionable recommendations to ensure the web is an environmentally sustainable platform.

This month we celebrate the UN Climate Week and NY Climate Week so it is a good time to highlight W3C’s contributions to People, Planet, and Prosperity.

Practical guidelines for digital products and services

The Sustainable Web Interest Group has been honing the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG), a set of practical guidelines that addresses the impacts of digital products and services. The guidelines will remain ever-evolving, but keen watchers will see the progress made through the middle of 2026.

The guidelines were created by a number of task forces, each responsible for creating a section of the guidelines. Assembling outputs from these groups highlighted some inconsistencies. The assembled guidelines were subjected to a comprehensive editorial overhaul, led by Alex Dawson and Rose Newell. This work concentrated on making sure the guidelines were specific and clear for the reader, as well as aligning the styles and ensuring grammatical and technical accuracy. The result is a set of uniform guidelines that appear to have been written by the same hand. This increases reader understanding of the guidelines as a whole.

Assigning relative impacts to web sustainability guidelines