Digital transformations the world over have been hailed for being “green”, in addition to the other benefits vis-à-vis economic and social development. Intuitively, one would imagine that transitioning to everything digital is good for the environment. Digitalisation is considered a key tool for the reduction of energy consumption in multiple sectors like IT. As a result, efforts to curb the damaging effects of climate change often incorporate digital technologies.
However, in its current format, the implementation of interventions geared towards digital transitions are actually contributing to, not preventing, global warming. This results from a constant underestimation of its direct and indirect environmental impacts or rebound effects, due to the miniaturisation and “invisibility” of digital infrastructures. Massive investments in digital technologies are likely to contribute to a burgeoning carbon footprint of the digital sectors.
The Shift Project, a French think tank advocating for the shift to a post-carbon economy, released a report titled “Lean ICT – Towards Digital Sobriety” in March 2019, highlighting the surging energy consumption of digital infrastructures and products. There are three key takeaways from the report, in terms of highlighting the global systemic effects of the highly uncertain nature of the current digital transition.
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Every year, the energy intensity of the digital industry increases by 4%, in stark contrast to the trend of global GDP’s energy intensity evolution, which is currently declining by 1.8% per year.
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Since 2010, the direct energy consumption caused by $1 invested in digital technologies has increased by 37%. This evolution contradicts the Paris Agreement’s goal to decouple energy consumption and climate change from GDP growth.
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The CO2 emissions of digital technologies increased by about 450 million tons since 2013 in OECD countries, while in the same period, the overall CO2 emissions globally decreased by 250 million tonnes.
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Current digital consumption is highly polarized. The digital overconsumption is not a global phenomenon: it is caused by high income countries, for which the major challenge is to take back control of their digital uses.
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Expected impacts of the digital transition on growth and productivity remain invisible in developed countries over the last 5 years. OECD GDP’s growth rate remains stable around 2% while the annual growth of digital expenditures has increased from 3% to 5%.
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The key challenge is to plan and prioritize investments by ensuring they efficiently serve sectoral priorities, that developing countries will derive the greatest benefits from increasing use of digital technologies.
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The digital overconsumption trend is unsustainable in terms of its requirements for energy and raw materials.
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The direct energy footprint of ICT includes energy for the production and use of equipment (servers, networks, terminals) which is increasing rapidly, by 9% per year.
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The capture of a gradually disproportionate part of available electricity increases the demand on electric production, which already struggles to decarbonize.
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The share of digital technologies in global greenhouse gas emissions has increased by half since 2013, from 2.5% to 3.7% of global emissions. The demand for raw materials such as rare and critical metals, essential for both digital and low-carbon energy technologies, is also growing.
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The explosion of video uses (Skype, streaming, etc.) and the increased consumption of short-lifespan digital equipment are the main drivers of this inflation.
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The report advocates for managing the environmental impact of digitalization by collectively making it “leaner” via sober digital practices. It highlights the possibility of digital sobriety to limit this growth to 1.5% per year. The underlying motivation is to recover individual and collective abilities that challenge socio-economic benefits of the consumption of digital objects and services, even though high-income countries alone bear the responsibility of overconsumption.
This shift from intemperance to sobriety in human relationships with digital technologies will not challenge the core principles of the digital transition. It cannot reduce the digital environmental footprint but prevents an explosion. Part 2 of the article discusses the means to deploy digital sobriety, in the context of digitalisation and the global analysis of the environmental impact of digital technologies.
India Outbound
March 11, 2019
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source https://indiaoutbound.org/the-environmental-burden-of-digitalisation/
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