Digitalization: A curse or a blessing for the environment?

World is going digital. Almost everything or every information you want is just a click away. Digital tools and services have become an essential part of our lives. It’s difficult to imagine our lives without smartphones, apps, google, online banking, GPS and having a huge selection of music and movies at your fingertips pretty much everywhere, around the clock. All of these things make our lives so much easier.

Digitalization is an amazing phenomenon that changes the way you think, act and operate. It allows you to automate systems, and free up your human resources to add value rather than grind through administrative tasks. It allows things to happen faster. Although, everything looks good when it is happening faster and is a click away but have you ever thought what’s the environmental impact of the online world? Digitalization is playing an increasingly important role in agriculture and industry, and helps in the shifting to renewable energy resources. It is mention worthy that digitalization is way for finding solutions for dealing with climate change and protecting the environment.

However, just because we can’t physically see or touch the data that we’re sending and receiving in the digital world, it does not mean that it does not produce any waste rather it actually carries heavier baggage. How? Its energy consumption is constantly growing, the smart devices that we rely on are often produced under environmentally harmful conditions. They have very short life spans and ultimately they end up as toxic electronic waste. This raises some very questions regarding the role of digitalization in making this world greener world, or is it going to prove to be an accelerator for climate change and cause the destruction of the planet?

Digital global carbon footprint is huge. More than half of the world’s population is now online. According to a report by the digital agency We Are Social, more than four billion people used the Internet in 2019, with more than one million people coming online for the first time each day. And with online activities such as cloud computing, streaming services and cashless payment systems on the up, the demand for online and digital services is constantly growing. According to the experts, their share of global digital CO₂ emissions increased from 2.5 to 3.7 percent between 2013 and 2018. This means that the digital technologies now actually causes more CO₂ emissions and has a bigger impact on global warming than the entire aviation industry. According to estimates, the aviation industry caused around 2.5 percent of emissions. These figures may vary slightly from study to study, as the energy consumption of digital technologies is difficult to quantify: because too little data is available, because technological advances and changing consumption habits cause them to change rapidly and because they’re highly dependent on the type of power that’s being used.

What digital activities are using the most energy?

According to some researchers each search query emits around 1.45 grams of CO₂. If we use a search engine to make around 50 search queries per day, this produces a huge 26 kilograms of CO₂ per year. Google itself, in its 2017 Environmental Report 2017, puts its carbon footprint for 2016 at 2.9 million tons of CO₂ and its electrical energy consumption at 6.2 terawatt hours (TWh).

But online searches are by no means the core of the problem: one of the biggest causes of the internet’s huge power consumption is in fact music and video streaming. According to research by The Shift Project, 80 percent of all data flows through the net in the form of moving images. Online videos – available on different platforms and viewed without being downloaded – account for almost 60 percent of global data transfer. Transmitting these moving images requires huge amounts of data. And the higher the resolution, the more data is sent and received.

According to The Shift Project, the average CO₂ consumption of streamed online video is more than 300 million tons per year (based on measurements taken in 2018). This is the same as emitted by the whole of Spain in a year. Another comparison out of interest: streaming ten hours of film in HD requires more bits and bytes than all of the articles in the English Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia put together.

It must be ensured that digitalization leads to sustainable development, and that digitalization itself is executed and applied in a sustainable way, should be the priority in policy making.

 

by:  Abeer Arshad 

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