The true climate cost of going digital

We are liv­ing in a dig­i­tal age. How­ev­er, the plan­et on which we are liv­ing is not dig­i­tal; it is phys­i­cal and its resources are finite. As a result, any trade-off between dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and sus­tain­abil­i­ty must be count­ed with care, not just in terms of the val­ue to busi­ness and soci­ety, but also the cost to the Earth.

In pre-pan­dem­ic times, dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and sus­tain­abil­i­ty often appeared togeth­er towards the top of the busi­ness agen­da. How­ev­er, recent research from Das­sault Sys­tèmes, con­duct­ed with ana­lyst firm Tech-Clar­i­ty, found coro­n­avirus caused 38 per cent of organ­i­sa­tions glob­al­ly to decrease atten­tion on envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty, while 18 per cent put it on hold com­plete­ly. The same sur­vey found 46 per cent of organ­i­sa­tions have increased their focus on dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion.

The trend is under­stand­able, even ben­e­fi­cial, says Séver­ine Trouil­let, glob­al affairs direc­tor, EuroNorth, at Das­sault Sys­tèmes. “While this may look like busi­ness­es are neglect­ing the plan­et to focus on imme­di­ate pri­or­i­ties, going dig­i­tal is a leap in the right direc­tion,” she says. “By reduc­ing reliance on trav­el and paper-based evi­dence, and increas­ing their abil­i­ty to col­lab­o­rate vir­tu­al­ly, com­pa­nies are effec­tive­ly reduc­ing their car­bon foot­print.”

Green data and a cleaner cloud

Any COVID-induced con­flict of inter­est between dri­vers of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and sus­tain­abil­i­ty needs resolv­ing, how­ev­er, with envi­ron­men­tal expec­ta­tions on the rise, says Tom Shel­ton, head of mar­ket­ing at solu­tions provider boxxe. “Con­sumers are now much more like­ly to inter­ro­gate and take note of ways in which com­pa­nies are han­dling envi­ron­men­tal respon­si­bil­i­ties, some­thing not unno­ticed by indus­try lead­ers. As the demand for sus­tain­abil­i­ty grows, so will board­room con­ver­sa­tions,” he says.

The first poten­tial con­flict to resolve is the car­bon foot­print of the dig­i­tal infra­struc­ture itself. Accord­ing to the Inter­na­tion­al Ener­gy Agency, dat­a­cen­tres account­ed for around 200 ter­awatt-hours of elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion in 2019, towards 1 per cent of glob­al use. How­ev­er, glob­al inter­net traf­fic surged almost 40 per cent between Feb­ru­ary and mid-April this year.

Some dat­a­cen­tre and cloud providers are clean­er and green­er than oth­ers, though, says Dun­can Gri­er­son, founder and chief exec­u­tive of sus­tain­able invest­ing plat­form Clim8 Invest. “It is true dat­a­cen­tres are them­selves ener­gy hun­gry, how­ev­er many of the big cloud providers, such as AWS and Google, are now buy­ing in much of their ener­gy needs from solar and wind.”

In fact, last year Google announced plans to invest up to $2 bil­lion more in clean pow­er, nego­ti­at­ing the biggest renew­able ener­gy deal in cor­po­rate his­to­ry. Then, in Sep­tem­ber, the com­pa­ny declared it had elim­i­nat­ed Google’s entire car­bon lega­cy through the pur­chase of off­sets to account for all oper­a­tional emis­sions pri­or to becom­ing car­bon neu­tral in 2007.

As well as pub­licly clean­ing up its act, the tech com­mu­ni­ty is also pro­vid­ing us with tools to cal­cu­late the com­par­a­tive car­bon cost of ser­vice-provider choic­es we make.

For exam­ple, this July saw the launch of a free real-time index by Bris­tol-based tech firm Yel­low­Dog that specif­i­cal­ly adds in car­bon impact to allow assess­ment of sus­tain­abil­i­ty across 25,000 dif­fer­ent options for cloud com­put­ing. This is the first time such a cli­mate-aware eval­u­a­tion has been pos­si­ble.

Water-cooling and the circular economy

Car­bon is not the only met­ric of suc­cess applic­a­ble to dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and sus­tain­abil­i­ty, how­ev­er. Much of the ener­gy con­sumed by dat­a­cen­tres world­wide is used for cool­ing, hence locat­ing them with­in the Arc­tic Cir­cle, for exam­ple. This cool­ing requires bil­lions of gal­lons of water, though, when water stress is a ris­ing cli­mate-risk fac­tor.

Elec­tric­i­ty stor­age require­ments of mobile dig­i­tal devices with recharge­able bat­ter­ies car­ry envi­ron­men­tal impacts too, includ­ing resource deple­tion and min­er­al extrac­tion in man­u­fac­ture, plus end-of-life dis­pos­al or recy­cling.

The ongo­ing impact is where the real dan­ger lies, as ener­gy and water become more scarce. We need a more holis­tic view

It should also be remem­bered that cut­ting or off­set­ting car­bon emis­sions is not the same as reduc­ing ener­gy con­sump­tion or boost­ing gen­er­a­tion. Glob­al access to afford­able clean ener­gy is increas­ing, but not yet abun­dant. So ener­gy-hun­gry dat­a­cen­tres that eat up sup­plies of renew­ables leave less green elec­tric­i­ty for sus­tain­ably heat­ing homes and pow­er­ing cars.

Carbon blindness in the c‑suite

See­ing this sym­bio­sis of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and sus­tain­abil­i­ty, the ques­tion remains whether cor­po­rates are real­ly watch­ing.

For Mark Sait, chief exec­u­tive of Save­Mon­ey­Cut­Car­bon, a lack of visu­al under­stand­ing of what a tonne of CO2 looks like and the impact it has amounts to car­bon blind­ness in the C‑suite. “Exec­u­tives will con­sid­er envi­ron­men­tal impact at the design and build stage, which is a good thing although more to do with reduc­ing oper­at­ing costs, than car­bon,” he says.

“The ongo­ing impact is where the real dan­ger lies, as ener­gy and water become more scarce. We need a more holis­tic view.”

Lev­els of envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness around going dig­i­tal actu­al­ly dif­fer by job role, says Justin Sut­ton-Park­er, chief exec­u­tive of PX3, and doc­tor­al researcher at War­wick Uni­ver­si­ty. His research found the C‑suite were 45 per cent aware that IT had a high impact on sus­tain­abil­i­ty, where­as non-board-lev­el roles in human resources, sales and finance were only 24 per cent switched on.

The dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing dri­vers among the C‑suite are their respon­si­bil­i­ties for green­house-gas report­ing and key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors (KPIs), explains Sut­ton-Park­er. “Dri­vers of com­pli­ance and KPIs at board lev­el are caus­ing the C‑suite to exam­ine the true envi­ron­men­tal impact of going dig­i­tal, where­as the mes­sage appears not to be fil­ter­ing down,” he adds.

Pricing pollution to incentivise change

Ulti­mate­ly, the net effect of effi­cien­cy gains via dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion, done right, should have an over­whelm­ing­ly pos­i­tive impact on tack­ling cli­mate change. The key to keep­ing any neg­a­tive envi­ron­men­tal con­se­quences in check is to incen­tivise the C‑suite to count the true cost, in car­bon, says Trevor Hutch­ings, direc­tor of strat­e­gy and com­mu­ni­ca­tions at Gem­serv.

He con­cludes: “Car­bon pol­lu­tion is a mar­ket fail­ure: an exter­nal­i­ty that needs to be priced to ensure those respon­si­ble bear the costs, there­fore dri­ving inno­va­tion, invest­ment and busi­ness prac­tice.”

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