Lesson 2Understanding digital sobriety
- Notion 7 - What does digital sobriety mean?
- Notion 8 - Blue and green economies
- Notion 9 - How can a digital sobriety concept be introduced in companies?
- Notion 10 - How to reduce your carbon footprint as a user by improving your working habits
- Notion 11 - What devices can we give preference to?
- Notion 12 - The main challenges to digital sobriety
- Notion 13 - Key facts about digital pollution and benefits for your business!
- Notion 14 - What are the benefits of digital sobriety for customers?
- Notion 15 - Review of the notion
Notion 12
The main challenges to digital sobriety
Target skills
Let us take a look at the main problems we face when we talk about digital sobriety:
Some of the problems the companies might encounter are:
1) Digital sobriety is not an issue of the IT department only, but of all the departments (IT, Purchasing, HR, Finance, Marketing etc. ) from top management down to all users. This requires training of all the staff and raising their awareness about the topic.
2) The difficulty of measuring digital technologies' environmental footprint. If you don´t get reliable, quantified data from your suppliers (cloud and manufactures) it is hard to evaluate your carbon footprint.
Unfortunately, sustainable digital technology is not always based on the organization's policies, which would allow the problems raised to be identified and countered. Make sure your organization has a recycling guideline and constant update trainings!
Another example of an issue you need to address as an organization is video streaming. In 2018, video streaming accounted for over 60 per cent of the total internet data flow and at least 1/5 of the world's digital greenhouse gas emissions, which means it produces the greatest part of internet pollution. In France, the video-on-demand market is currently growing at a rate of 15.6% and already has over 8.3 million subscribers.
When we talk about the problem of video streaming, and video on demand, how it concerns our company (we usually don´t watch Netflix and YouTube at work), what companies use - is video conferencing. But compared to the travelling that face-to–face meetings require, video conferencing is much more sustainable than a trip to a meeting in another country.
The challenge of a digital project is to find the best balance between People – Planet - Profit.
An example:
- Train: 1 kilometer traveled pollutes 0.044 kg of CO2
- Airplane: 1 kilometer traveled pollutes 30 times more than 1 kilometer by train (about 1,32 Kg)
- Video conferences: one hour of video conferencing (i.e. a meeting on Zoom) emits about 150 grams of CO2
Individuals' digital devices are increasingly perceived as an extension of themselves, making awareness of these impacts even more problematic. We see them as an important and fundamental part of us and our lives, so this leads to underestimating the consequences and impact. One of the biggest problems about carbon footprint is the current 38 billion digital devices in the world.
A good practice within your company can be to extend the life of various devices or give them a 'second life'.
In general, it is a matter of adopting, individually and collectively, new consumption behaviors: switching off network equipment outside working hours or extending the life of equipment in a context where remote working is encouraged. And, in the future, where remote working should be a new managerial order for organizations...
We must therefore increase our awareness of the digital impact and act accordingly.