The Climate Cost of our Digital Lives: Digital is Physical View Digital Media

Innovation Showcase
Alisa Bonsignore  

The accelerating wave of digital content is increasing the energy demands on an already overextended planet. There is a perception that digital is less environmentally costly than cutting down trees for paper. Yet the energy costs for our digital lives can be steep. Every byte is energy, and energy has a carbon cost. And our digital footprints are ever-increasing; the world is generating more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created annually, no doubt a significant contributor to the fact that the world has almost doubled its energy consumption since 1980. I have developed formulas to calculate the carbon impact of your digital initiatives. These formulas can be applied proactively to new projects to understand the carbon cost of content. All sustainability and communications professionals should keep these numbers in mind when deciding what needs to be communicated, and how. 1. All content has a measurable emissions impact 2. How to assess the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions for everything from websites to emails to video meetings 3. How to incorporate sustainable content metrics into your best practices