RE4ES: Support Environmental Sustainability by Requirements Engineering

[Motivation:] Environmental sustainability is an important concern. Information and communication technology (ICT) innovation is ambivalently positioned with regard to our rapid development and shortening innovation cycles. On one hand, information technology facilitates the (excessive) usage of resources. On the other hand, ICT can also help to significantly reduce human impact on the environment. [Problem:] Environmental sustainability is currently not supported explicitly in requirements engineering (RE). This leads to the problem that (a) environmental sustainability is not yet given sufficient importance and (b) it is difficult to manifest in requirements & design and therefore hard to assess. [Principal idea:] We need to combine the knowledge of RE, environmental informatics, and further disciplines, to develop an RE approach that tailors analysis, documentation, and assessment for ICT systems where environmental sustainability is a first class quality objective. [Contribution:] This paper is a research preview on an approach to help requirements engineers handle sustainability as a first class quality objective. It elaborates on how we plan to refine and validate this approach in the future.