What is digital sustainability and why do we need it?

Mention sustainability, and people link it to climate change, renewable energy, organic food, electric cars, or a circular economy. But none of those can be supported without the cloud and the data infrastructure that enables them. The digital world matters as much as the material one. And so does the sustainability of it. The impact is huge.

Soon, our present notion of sustainability will turn 40. Back in 1987, Gro Harlem Brundtland cornered the famous definition of sustainability in the report “Our Common Future”. That was 5 years before the appearance of the first smartphone, and years before the widespread use of the internet. It was in the heydays of analog life, which makes it time for a reset. Sustainability too has to transform from analog to digital.

Sustainability seeks to protect the future from the present abuse of means, conditions, and resources. The definition, “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” was explained from a rather physical point of view. It focused heavily on the use of resources and energy and the effects of it on the environment and the climate. Needs were primarily understood in terms of access to clean air, water, resources, and health. While the principles still stand strong, our needs have extended over time.

Now, nearly 40 years later, basic needs include access to data. In a digitalized society nobody can fully function without it. Data has become the major connection between People, Planet, and Profit, and thus affects the core of the sustainability principle. But what does that mean?

Energy and resources

Producing and using digital data is greatly dependent on resources and energy. The hardware needed to support the data infrastructure relies heavily on scarce materials like earth metals. They are needed both in the essential microprocessors and in the equipment to produce renewable energy. And since a large part of the energy for operating data networks and producing hardware is still generated from fossil fuels, data contributes significantly to emissions and to climate change. How much? By 2030 the energy use of data communications could amount to 20% of the world electricity consumption. That does not include the energy needed to produce hardware. So far, all this is covered by the original interpretation of sustainability.

How else then, can digital data influence the ability of future generations to meet their needs? 

To answer that question, let’s first have a quick look back into history.

A brief history of data

Throughout history, data has come to us in the form of stories, songs, signs, images, and texts. They were told, sung, painted, or written by people and distributed by analog media like paintings and books. Technology brought along the telegraph, telephone, TV, and the internet. While those inventions speeded up the transfer and dissemination of data and knowledge tremendously, the amount of resources and energy needed to support that progress increased with every new step. They grew exponentially when the border between analog and digital processing was crossed silently, with the introduction of computers, smartphones, and the internet.

By itself, expanding data does not necessarily lead to any excessive pressure on resources or energy. When people were telling stories that were retold, and teaching songs sung by many, the multiplication of data did not affect ecosystems or natural resources. Books took some modest resources to be produced but could be read over and over, for centuries. Responding to the content with another book was a privilege of few and took years. The contribution to knowledge and the development of society greatly outweighed the investment in terms of physical means. One could say that the sustainability factor, the capacity for future generations to fulfill their needs using books, was positive. Using books increased that capacity for those generations.

A mutual dependency

Gradually, more technology required more energy and more resources. A wider availability of data led to widespread use. By now, without the help of digitalized and automated data collecting and processing, we can’t keep our air and water clean, we get no food on the table and our transportation would hopelessly come to a full stop. Modern healthcare would be unimaginable and our financial systems would cease to function. We can’t fight climate change without the help of massive amounts of data. We can’t defend ourselves against pandemics or even wars without them. All our information and communications rely on it. And we can’t produce and maintain all this data without more energy and more technology. A mutual dependency has emerged.

More so, this entire system operates in real-time, here and now. When it fights climate change, it is about the change we created ourselves before and which has to be inverted now. Whatever problems this system helps to solve, it’s problems of the past and the present. Solving them at best prevents the future from not getting much worse. Thus the sustainability factor became negative. What use is this present knowledge in the future if people lack the resources to apply it? What can you do with digital data without devices to use it and the energy to run them?

Dilution and delusion 

Data, in contrast to natural resources, has one distinctly different characteristic: it expands in volume by using it, whereas physical resources typically decrease through consumption, causing scarcity. 

Data, like air or water, must be clean and unpolluted to be useful and meaningful. It needs to be trustworthy to be beneficial. False data do the same as polluted air and water do: they put the health, if not the very existence of people, nature, and society at risk.

From the introduction of the internet, and especially after social media emerged, everyone who can consume data can produce data as well. Free, quasi-uncontrolled, and without limits. True or false. In good faith or ill-intentioned. 

One result is a catastrophic dilution of content. Petabytes of information are duplicated, replicated, and pumped around without obvious value or purpose, other than creating data for the sake of it (and maybe for the illusion of making some money off it). All this data needs energy and hardware to be consumed, reversing cause and result and initiating an out-of-control spiral. 

Another equally catastrophic result is the delusional, ill-intended content that is pumped around, disconnecting trust and truth, and destabilizing society. 

Recently, the process has been enhanced further with the arrival of AI, so-called artificial intelligence, of which even the experts that helped create it don’t know how to control it. (I will address AI-related issues later in a separate post)

These developments will most likely, and frighteningly, deprive our kids and their offspring even further from the opportunity to live well-being lives than climate change already does.

We need to address digital sustainability to prevent this from happening or getting worse beyond our control. It matters, and it matters big.