This article was initially published in the September 2024 newsletter of the SwissICT published.
Our digital world has developed incredibly quickly over the last few decades. Digital technologies are an integral part of our everyday lives and shape our lives. But it's not just technology that has evolved. As a result of worldwide industrialization, global warming has emerged as one of humanity's biggest concerns. The causes of global warming run through all areas of industry, but IT seems to pay little attention to this issue. What impact does IT have on our planet?
The study "The Shift Project" (2019) states that the ICT world accounts for 3.7% of the global carbon footprint. According to estimates, this share could double by 2025. According to a study published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2020, data centers account for around 1% of global electricity consumption, which corresponds to around 0.8% of global CO2 emissions - for data centers alone. The latest sustainability reports from Microsoft and Google show one thing above all: the carbon footprint of these two technology giants is not decreasing. Their CO2-emissions are 29% higher at Microsoft and 48% higher at Google than in the reference years 2020 (Microsoft) and 2019 (Google). The reason for this is the increasing resource requirements of artificial intelligence. It is therefore clear that the increasing consumption of resources in the digital world is making the ICT sector a significant factor in global warming.
How can the ICT sector become more sustainable? Sustainable IT propagates the sustainable use of IT. This can be broken down into the three areas of "Sustainable IT", "Sustainable through IT" and "Sustainability for society" subdivided.
Sustainable IT
This is primarily about the internal perspective. A company focuses on its CO2-footprint generated by the company's own IT organization. This includes, for example, the emissions caused by the hardware and devices used by employees or the resources required by a company's own data center. Significant improvements can often be achieved through pragmatic measures. These include, for example, extending hardware lifecycles by replacing used devices or decommissioning unused services and applications.
Sustainable through IT
The focus is on achieving a sustainable impact through digital technologies and innovations. This means making processes more efficient in order to reduce emissions. Digitalization is an important keyword here, as it has made many processes more efficient in recent decades. For example, digital solutions have made the transportation sector more efficient, saving emissions caused by unnecessary transport routes. Another example is the collection of climate data, which makes it possible to better understand the impact of global warming and more accurately predict the consequences for regions at risk.
Sustainability for society
Sustainability not only includes CO2-emissions and ecological footprints. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations also include social aspects, and the ICT sector is not excluded here. Sustainability for society in the ICT sector concerns, for example, education, the integration of minorities and the protection of human and labor rights, such as in the production of IT hardware or the training of LLMs. These aspects are often overlooked, but social and environmental aspects are of great importance in the extraction of materials and metals for the production of laptops or smartphones.
Balance is crucial
Without the digital world and its technologies, it will be difficult to stop global warming. At the same time, we know that the development and introduction of new technologies can have a negative impact on our planet. A balance is needed. Sustainability must be consciously taken into account when making decisions in the ICT sector. This is the only way we can achieve sustainable use of digital technologies and responsible use of the digital world's resources.
