How digital technologies can reduce the global carbon footprint — Part 3

Implementing digital sobriety

5 min readMay 7, 2022

Digital transformation

Digital transformation is “the cultural, organizational, and operational change of an organization, industry, or ecosystem through intelligent integration of digital technologies, processes, and competencies staged and strategically across all levels and functions.”[1] The transformation through digitalization fundamentally changes how businesses operate and deliver value to customers[2].

More than just making existing data digital, digitalization embraces the ability of digital technology to collect data, establish trends and make better business decisions.

Digital sobriety

At this point, our digital growth is unsustainable. According to the 2020 Executive Summary of The Shift Project[3], there is a 9% annual increase in energy consumption due to digitalization. By implementing digital sobriety, which means moving from compulsive use to more controlled use of digital systems, we should be heading to a more sustainable impact of digital technologies from an environmental standpoint.

Digital sobriety is an approach that aims to reduce the environmental impact of digital technology. Proposed by The Shift Project[4], it seeks to maximize the positive effects of digital technology and minimize its adverse effects. It promotes using the Internet and technology more mindfully and responsibly. It consists of prioritizing the allocation of resources as a function of uses to conform to the planet’s physical boundaries while preserving the most valuable societal contributions of digital technologies. To help with its implementation, The Shift Project created the Lean ICT Project[5].

Lean ICT Project

The Shift’s Lean ICT project reflects practices and actions to limit digital technology’s direct and indirect environmental impacts while maximizing the net effect of digital levers in terms of ecological transition. It is part of a context where digital energy consumption increases faster than forecasts and, by extension, induced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are also increasing. The Shift Project has shown that we would need to reduce our GHG emissions by at least 5% per year from 2018 onwards to achieve these targets.

The production of digital equipment makes it a heavy consumer of metals, some of which are rare and critical and whose accessible reserves (at current cost and with current technologies) are limited. Many of them also present probable production peaks in the decades to come. This situation is likely to weaken the development of uses and undermine the resilience of our digital societies.

While the increase in equipment rates and the multiplication of types of peripherals make full use of available reserves of these metals, many of them are challenging to recycle. For example, the recycling rate of indium, gallium, tantalum, and germanium is lower than 1%[6]. Recycling also becomes more difficult as the number of metals in a component increases and concentrations decrease. This situation can lead to a technological dead-end if the growth in needs does not slow down, mainly since many of these metals are also used in large proportions to produce equipment needed for renewable energies.

According to the Lean ICT 2019 Report, “a sober digital transition mainly consists of buying the least powerful equipment possible, changing them the least often possible, and reducing unnecessary energy-intensive uses.” Digital sobriety’s principles expand to a societal level the importance and objectives pursued by technical approaches such as Green IT.

The Lean ICT Project has three main objectives:

Quantitatively clarify the impacts
Identify trends and levers
Propose actions

Quantitatively clarify the impacts

The goal is to have reliable benchmarks immediately mobilizable by non-specialists in collective and individual decision-making. This quantitative analysis is aimed to be through the publication of a Digital Environmental Repository (DER).

The Digital Environmental Repository (DER) aims to describe the digital ecosystem’s environmental footprint in terms of equipment and uses in the form of characteristic quantities and ratios. As the Digital Transition is taking an increasingly important place in both companies and society, our digital culture must be enriched by knowledge and understanding of the environmental impacts of our digital objects and actions.

The Digital Environmental Repository is an embryo of the database that must be established if we want to inform on the decisions that can lead to a resource-resilient digital world. Its objective is to present orders of magnitude considered fundamental to concrete the environmental impact of digital technologies. It requires updating and criticism from experts in the sector: the aim is to preserve its relevance and make it the starting point for a significant project that would lead to a standardized and universal database on the net environmental impact of digital technology.

Identify trends and levers

The levers selected and proposed as actions have been chosen to be as pertinent as possible on the operational level. The goal is to provide an approach and proposals that decision-makers can quickly implement. Each of these levers has been subjected to a quantification based on data consolidated in the Digital Environmental Repository. This quantification of the lever’s effect corresponds to an evaluation of the reduction in the annual environmental impact of the item concerned, represented by GHG emissions.

Propose actions

In its Lean ICT Report, the Shift Project provides four action levers qualified as “good practices” to implement digital sobriety in a company. These recommendations are examples of active measures that companies can implement using digital technologies to reduce the environmental impact of their digital ecosystem.

Lengthening the life of professional devices
Setting up a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy
Favoring the exchange of office documents on a shared platform
Implementing operational metrics

To go further…

References

[1] What is digital business transformation? The essential guide to DX.I-Scoop.
[2] What is digital transformation? Why is it important. Salesforce.
[3] The Shift Project. (2020). Implementing digital sufficiency. Executive Summary.
[4] The Shift Project. (2020). Digital Sobriety: How the Internet is Harming the Environment.
[5] The Shift Project. (2019). Lean ICT: Towards digital sobriety.
[6] Material efficiency by marking in EU Ecodesign. (2017). RDC Environment.