Nineteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

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. In 2018, Forbes reported that 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 communications teams should keep these numbers in mind when deciding what needs to be communicated, and how.