The Covid pandemic prompted more of us than ever before to migrate our lives online in an attempt to retain some semblance of normality. A recent study from Macquarie University’s School of Social Sciences examines what impact these digital habits have on the planet.
“We don’t often think about the various infrastructures required to do simple things like send an email or hold our photos—these digital things are stored in data centers that are often out of sight, out of mind,” the researchers explain. “If we think about it at all, we usually expect these services to be continual and think that there isn’t really a limit on those digital practices.”
Environmental impact
Because many digital services are so accessible and the variable cost of adding extra users is minimal, it can be tempting to assume that they also come with a low environmental footprint. This really isn’t the case, however, as digital activity can produce not only high levels of greenhouse gases but also requires heavy land use from mining and so on, and also intensive water use as part of the global infrastructure that underpins digital services.
The researchers tried to look at a range of digital services in the whole and therefore go beyond simply looking at the energy used by things like data centers and our personal devices. This approach highlighted the scale of the environmental resources used by common digital activities.
For instance, a single hour of videoconferencing was enough to generate around a kg of CO2 while also requiring around 12 liters of water. Much of this usage was driven by the video aspect of the calls, as if we turn off the camera we’re likely to save around 98% of that expenditure.
As we might expect given the high costs involved with video conferencing, our video streaming habits are also extremely expensive. Indeed, a solitary hour of HD streaming is enough to produce 160kg of CO2 each year. If we switch to Standard Definition, this falls to just 8kg per year.
Email was less expensive, but still generated around 0.3 grams of CO2, with this cost higher when we communicate between mobile devices, with laptop-to-laptop emailing less intensive.
While cloud-based storage has ballooned in recent years, the relatively low financial cost should not hide the high environmental costs involved. The research showed that the average data center emits approximately 0.2 tons of CO2 each year for every gb of storage they offer.
Industrial usage
Perhaps understandably, heavy users of computing were also heavy producers of carbon dioxide. For instance, it’s estimated that using a standard supercomputer is enough to generate a whopping 15 kilotons of CO2 a year. To put this into perspective, this exceeds the amount consumed by operating all of Australia’s traditional observatories, office buildings, and even the international flights taken each year by astronomers. Switching to renewable energy, as the Dutch do, would reduce this by around 96%.
Training AI models is similarly expensive, with the researchers estimating that doing so consumes more energy than flying around the world 315 times. The researchers hope that their work highlights the various ways in which our digital habits can impact the planet.
“There’s a lot to take in, and many of these figures will change depending on things like the use of renewable energy that is being taken up by some digital corporations and many individuals,” they explain.
“This highlights the complexity of this challenge, showing that understanding and addressing digital sustainability goes beyond individual responsibilities, and is more fittingly held by governments and corporations.”
Greater transparency
The researchers believe that more needs to be done to improve the transparency around the energy and other environmental impacts of digital technologies and digital companies, especially when it comes to meeting sustainability targets.
“Most device manufacturers subscribe to a ‘planned obsolescence’ paradigm, rather than circular economy—for example, big tech continues to produce smartphones that are not designed to last,” they explain.
While they found that most people were concerned about the sustainability of the technologies they use, this concern didn’t always translate into changes to everyday habits and behaviors.
“People expressed concern for the sustainability of their digital technologies, but they had limited opportunities to do anything substantive about this issue,” the authors continue.
I have previously questioned the environmental friendliness of remote working, as various studies have assessed whether the reduction in travel is enough to compensate for the increase in digital consumption. It is easy to assume that digital technology has no impact, when the reality is often very different. Hopefully, more studies like this one will alert us to that fact.
“There are many alternatives for how we live digitally, from making decisions about what’s ‘good enough’ to changing the whole digital lifecycle and the way it is regulated,” the researchers conclude. “Individuals cannot be expected to resolve these issues; governments need to regulate and corporations need to act, to improve our digital future and make it sustainable.”
