THE CLIMATE CRISIS Lean ICT
he current trend for digital overconsumption in the world is not sustainable with respect to the supply of energy and materials it requires,” states the report Lean ICT: Towards Digital Sobriety, written by The Shift Project, a French non-profit organisation helping companies make the transition to a post-carbon economy. The report proposes that digital companies work toward a goal of ‘digital sobriety’. Directed by Hugues Ferreboeuf, a consultant with a long career in the telecom industry, the Lean ICT report was assembled by a working group of ten people – academics, professionals and experts from the sector – who began meeting in April 2017 to brainstorm ways of generating synergy between the digital and energy transition, with the aim of maximising the positive impacts of digital technology on the environment while minimising the negative impacts. As a starting point, the report states that digital technologies are essential for economic and social development worldwide, but also that the direct and indirect impacts related to digital growth are constantly underestimated. “There is a risk of a scenario in which increasingly massive investment in digital technologies would contribute to a net increase of digitalised sectors’ carbon footprint, which has been the case for more than a decade,” claims the report. It offers some pithy, and unnerving, factoids on digital power consumption:
“Spending ten minutes watching a high-definition video by streaming on a smartphone is equivalent to using a 2000W electric oven at full power for five minutes.” And it emphasises that the use of digital devices triggers a number of other hidden technologies to consume power as well: “The real energy consumption during the lifecycle of a smartphone is 33 times greater than its annual electricity consumption, which is the only consumption that the user can possibly measure today.” The Lean ICT report pulls no punches in stating that the worldwide systemic effects of the digital transition are far from certain, that with these accelerating technologies come a lot of volatility. The environmental damage threatened by the digital explosion can be avoided, according to the report, by taking a restrained approach to adopting and deploying technologies. The report highlights the ‘rebound effect’ (described by “Jevons’ Paradox” – see this issue’s Over the Top on page 62)
PRODUCING A SMARTPHONE GENERATES 400 TIMESMORE EMISSIONS THAN ITS UTILISATION NUMBER OF DIGITAL DEVICES PER CAPITA BY REGION (FORECAST)
2016
2021
CAGR
Asia Pacific
1.9
2.9
8.3%
Central and Eastern Europe
2.5
3.8
9.1%
Latin America
2.1
2.9
7%
Middle East and Africa
1.1
1.4
5.4%
North America
7.7
12.9
11%
Western Europe
5.3
8.9
10.9%
Global
2.3
3.5
8.5%
SOURCE: CISCO VNI, 2017
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