Report · Sep 23, 2026
Software Developers on Climate Change, AI, and Sustainable Software: A survey of GitHub users, Summer 2026
By Grace Vorreuter, Paull Young, Marija Verner, Jennifer Marlon, Emily Goddard, Jennifer Carman, Seth Rosenthal and Anthony Leiserowitz
Filed under: Beliefs & Attitudes
5. Personal Impact and Agency
5.1 GitHub users are most likely to say voting and civic engagement reduce their personal environmental impact.
When asked about the effect of five different actions on reducing their personal environmental impact, respondents are most likely to say voting and/or civic engagement (28%), advocating for sustainability practices (22%), and personal lifestyle choices (21%) have a “large” effect. Fewer say the same about contributing to open source projects focused on sustainability (14%) or how they develop and write software (10%).
About six in ten respondents (63%) say the way they develop and write software has only a “small” effect on reducing their personal environmental impact, and 28% say it has a “moderate” effect.