Analysis and news
Facing up to digital pollution Liz Martin asks: what can publishers do about the environmental impact of digital content?
When we think of greenhouse gas emissions, it tends to conjure up images of cars, aeroplanes and factory buildings with smoke billowing from the top. We talk a lot about the need for renewable energy, and the need to move towards electric vehicles, better public transport and more cycling. And rightly so. But questions are now also being asked about the energy consumption associated with digital technologies. There is a perception that digital
content is ‘carbon light’ and there is no doubt it is certainly ‘lighter’ than printed publications. However, digital pollution is a growing issue. Every time we browse, communicate, meet online, upload images or stream videos, a small amount of carbon dioxide is emitted, and in the last year or so this has increased beyond expectations. These carbon emissions are a result of the data storage and the network infrastructure needed to support the internet and store the content we access, which are incredibly energy intensive. A white paper published by the Carbon Trust estimates an average carbon
footprint of 55gCO2e per hour of video streaming in Europe in 2020. For context, the European Environment Agency reported that in 2019 the average new car or van in Europe emitted 122.4gCO2 per kilometre. In 2020, we published over 100,000
research articles online which were downloaded over 70 million times, and what we don’t yet know is exactly what the impact of this is on the environment. Until now, it has been virtually impossible to calculate the carbon emissions of our digital publishing activities and the use of our publications. Even now nobody has all the answers, but thankfully it is an increasing area of focus and research. Getting to grips with digital emissions is a priority for IOP Publishing.
As a part of the wider calculation of a
carbon footprint, the first step is to get a comprehensive and accurate picture of digital emissions. To achieve this, we’ve joined a collaborative project that helps the digital media and publishing industries better understand their digital carbon footprint. Developed by computer scientists at University of Bristol, in collaboration with sustainability experts Carnstone, DIMPACT provides an online tool to track and map carbon emissions. The information we will gather will help
us to understand the energy consumption of our entire system across data centres, networks and user devices, and crucially, where our ‘hotspots’ are. From there we can start to put in place measures and make choices about how we create, process and deliver our content, that will reduce the environmental impact of our activities; avoiding and reducing
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“The first step is to get a comprehensive and accurate picture of digital emissions”
34 Research Information October/November 2021
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