Sustainable IT (I)
This is the first of a series of articles whose goal is to provide an introduction to the concept of Sustainable IT, also known as Green IT.
The goal of the series is to cover the following topics:
As usual, if you find anything that can be improved, I am happy to hear your ideas. If you find this interesting, inspiring, or useful, do not hesitate to share it. This is not an attempt to get promotion for free. I am honestly interested in your thoughts. So, share them with me via private message o via email to [email protected].
Without further ado, let's begin.
Definition
It seems it is difficult to agree on a single shared definition of sustainability, so here is the one I like the most. According to the "Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future" by the United Nations General Assembly (1987) "Sustainable development seeks to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet those of the future.".
In this context, Sustainable IT (or Green IT) can be defined as the practice of ideating, defining, designing, implementing, providing, using, and reusing environmentally sustainable information technology products and services.
Importance
Awareness of global environmental issues can be traced to the 1960s when the harmful effects of pesticides were first discussed.
Since then, the human impact on the environment has grown, in many ways: pollution, burning fossil fuels, deforestation, etc. triggering climate change, soil erosion, poor air quality, undrinkable water, and the depletion of all sort of non-renewable resources.
The study Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity. Ecology and Society [1] was published in 2009. In the article, nine planetary boundaries are identified and, drawing upon scientific understanding at the time, the authors proposed quantifications for seven of them.?They state that transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be deleterious or even catastrophic due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental change within continental- to planetary-scale systems. These seven are climate change; ocean acidification; stratospheric ozone; biogeochemical nitrogen cycle and phosphorus cycle; global freshwater use; land system change; and the rate at which biological diversity is lost. The two additional planetary boundaries are chemical pollution and atmospheric aerosol loading.?
The chemical pollution boundary has been expanded and renamed “Novel Entities” created entirely by us humans. They include emissions of toxic compounds such as synthetic organic pollutants and radioactive materials, but also genetically modified organisms, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics.?
The following diagram depicts planetary boundaries; orange sections indicate "overshoot" of boundaries, green sections indicate a "safe" state within the boundaries. [2].
Two of the planetary boundaries are closely related to ICT, they are: climate change and novel entities. Let's focus on climate change first.
ICT impact on climate change
The main driver of climate change is the greenhouse effect.?The greenhouse effect is caused by greenhouse gases(GHG for short) which absorb and emit radiation at specific wavelengths within the spectrum of thermal infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface, the atmosphere itself, and by clouds.?
The main GHGs (water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane and ozone) occur naturally in the Earth’s atmosphere, but human activities are increasing the levels of GHGs’ in the atmosphere.
CO2 produced by human activities is the largest contributor to global warming [5]. The mass of carbon in the atmosphere increased by 48% from 590 GtC in 1750 to 876 GtC in 2020 [6].
Moreover, there are several entirely human-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as the halocarbons and other chlorine and bromine containing substances. “Carbon dioxide equivalent” or “CO2e” is a term for describing different greenhouse gases in a common unit.?The Global Warming Potential(GWP) is the index used to calculate the CO2 equivalence of emissions and removals of the GHGs. CO2 has the index value of 1; the GWP for all other GHGs is the number of times more warming they cause compared to CO2. For instane, 1kg of methane causes 25 times more warming over a 100 year period compared to 1kg of CO2, and so methane as a GWP of 25.
It is important to notice the limitations in the use of GWPs based on the 100-year time horizon in evaluating the contribution to climate change of emissions of greenhouse gases as it does not properly weight long living GHGs.
The energy sector is one of the primary contributors of GHG emissions, contributing to over 60 percent of total GHG emissions.
Affordable and clean energy is one of the goals in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Latest data suggest that the world continues to advance towards sustainable energy targets. Nevertheless, the current pace of progress is insufficient to achieve Goal 7 by 2030. Huge disparities in access to modern sustainable energy persist. The share of renewables in total final energy consumption reached 17.7 per cent in 2019, 1.6 percentage points higher than in 2010. [10]
So, how much energy does ICT consume? And, most importantly: what is the impact of ICT energy consumption in the climate change? Global ICT-related energy consumption in 2021 was 580-800 TWh according to the following table:
领英推荐
Data centers and data transmission networks are responsible for nearly 1% of energy related GHG emissions. [8]
Data centers and data transmission networks are responsible for nearly 1% of energy related GHG emissions.
According to another analysis of data center energy consumption patterns, published by Statista, traditional data centers globally have decreased their energy demand, from around 98 TWh in 2015, to some 50 TWh in 2019, and a forecast indicated that this figure will reach nearly 33 TWh by 2021. On the other hand, hyperscale data centers have doubled their energy demand in the same period of time, reaching nearly 97 TWh in 2021. Cloud (non-hyperscale) data centers would reach nearly 72 TWh energy consumption in 2021. [11]
The following table shows electricity consumption of some of the world’s biggest tech companies:
(*) Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is a metric used to determine the energy efficiency of a data center. PUE is determined by dividing the total amount of power entering a data center (including, for instance, lights, cooling, pumps, heating, ventilation, UPS, etc.) by the power used to run the IT equipment within it (servers, storage, and telecommunications' equipment).
Comming next
Closure
So far, I've shared with you the cold data. In case I have not convinced you so far, I'll now appeal to emotion .
Our generation grew up hearing stories about the discovery and settlement of other planets in far-flung solar systems. Beyond these promises, the Earth is today the only planet that we humans can live on. While it seems probable that we might find other habitable planets in the future, not every human being would be able to go there. Chances are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and several others alike will be enjoying colossal mansions there and look down on your offspring as it strugles to survive and gets extincted on a polluted earth.
The Earth, that pale blue dot alone in the frozen space, is our home. It has been lent to us and we are responsible for looking after it until we give it back.
Resources
[1] Rockstr?m, J., W. Steffen, K. Noone, ?. Persson, F. S. Chapin, III, E. Lambin, T. M. Lenton, M. Scheffer, C. Folke, H. Schellnhuber, B. Nykvist, C. A. De Wit, T. Hughes, S. van der Leeuw, H. Rodhe, S. S?rlin, P. K. Snyder, R. Costanza, U. Svedin, M. Falkenmark, L. Karlberg, R. W. Corell, V. J. Fabry, J. Hansen, B. Walker, D. Liverman, K. Richardson, P. Crutzen, and J. Foley. 2009. Planetary boundaries:exploring the safe operating space for humanity.?Ecology and Society. [online] https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/
[2] Steffen, Will; Richardson, Katherine; Rockstr?m, Johan; Cornell, Sarah E.; Fetzer, Ingo; Bennett, Elena M.; Biggs, Reinette; Carpenter, Stephen R.; de Vries, Wim; de Wit, Cynthia A.; Folke, Carl (2015). "Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet". Science. [online] https://doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.1259855
[3] Image attribution: J. Lokrantz/Azote based on Steffen et al. 2015. [online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PB_pollutants_2022_update.png
[4] Image attribution: NASA [online] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pale_Blue_Dot.png
[5] https://climate.ec.europa.eu/climate-change/causes-climate-change_en
[6] Friedlingstein, P., Jones, M. W., O'Sullivan, M., Andrew, R. M., Bakker, D. C. E., Hauck, J., Le Quéré, C., Peters, G. P., Peters, W., Pongratz, J., Sitch, S., Canadell, J. G., Ciais, P., Jackson, R. B., Alin, S. R., Anthoni, P., Bates, N. R., Becker, M., Bellouin, N., Bopp, L., Chau, T. T. T., Chevallier, F., Chini, L. P., Cronin, M., Currie, K. I., Decharme, B., Djeutchouang, L. M., Dou, X., Evans, W., Feely, R. A., Feng, L., Gasser, T., Gilfillan, D., Gkritzalis, T., Grassi, G., Gregor, L., Gruber, N., Gürses, ?., Harris, I., Houghton, R. A., Hurtt, G. C., Iida, Y., Ilyina, T., Luijkx, I. T., Jain, A., Jones, S. D., Kato, E., Kennedy, D., Klein Goldewijk, K., Knauer, J., Korsbakken, J. I., K?rtzinger, A., Landschützer, P., Lauvset, S. K., Lefèvre, N., Lienert, S., Liu, J., Marland, G., McGuire, P. C., Melton, J. R., Munro, D. R., Nabel, J. E. M. S., Nakaoka, S.-I., Niwa, Y., Ono, T., Pierrot, D., Poulter, B., Rehder, G., Resplandy, L., Robertson, E., R?denbeck, C., Rosan, T. M., Schwinger, J., Schwingshackl, C., Séférian, R., Sutton, A. J., Sweeney, C., Tanhua, T., Tans, P. P., Tian, H., Tilbrook, B., Tubiello, F., van der Werf, G. R., Vuichard, N., Wada, C., Wanninkhof, R., Watson, A. J., Willis, D., Wiltshire, A. J., Yuan, W., Yue, C., Yue, X., Zaehle, S., and Zeng, J.: Global Carbon Budget 2021, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 14, 1917–2005, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-1917-2022, 2022.
[7] IPCC (2007). IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007. The Working Group I contribution to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report - Errata. https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ar4-wg1-errata.pdf
[8] IEA (2022), Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks, License: CC BY 4.0
[9] IPCC version AR2 data from the PRIMAP-hist national historical emissions time series data set (1850-2014) published by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. https://resourcewatch.org/dashboards/energy?tab=global
[10] UN: SDG 7 - Affordable and clean energy. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/energy/
[11] Global Data Centers Energy Demand by Type 2015-2021 by Nane S?nnichsen. Statista Inc. on Sept. 30, 2021. https://www.statista.com/statistics/186992/global-derived-electricity-consumption-in-data-centers-and-telecoms/
[12] Microsoft’s 2021 Environmental Sustainability Report. https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE4RwfV
[13] https://www.cloudcarbonfootprint.org/docs/methodology/#appendix-i-energy-coefficients