More than half of the digital data that companies generate is collected, processed and stored for single-use purposes. Often it is never used again. This could be your many near-identical images stored in Google Photos or iCloud, outdated business spreadsheets that will never be reused, or data from internet of things sensors that are unavailable. purpose.
This “dark data” is tied to the real world by the energy it requires. Even data that is stored and never used again takes up space on servers – typically huge banks of computers in warehouses. Those computers and those warehouses use a lot of electricity.
This is a significant energy cost that most organizations hide. Maintaining an effective memory organization is a challenge, but what is the cost to the environment? In an effort to move towards net zero, many organizations are trying to reduce their carbon footprint. Guidelines typically focus on reducing traditional sources of carbon production, through mechanisms such as carbon offsetting through third parties (e.g. planting trees to offset emissions from petroleum use).
Digital carbon footprint
While most climate change activists focus on limiting emissions from the auto, aviation and energy industries, digital data processing has been comparable to These areas are still evolving. By 2020, digitization is projected to generate 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The production of digital data is growing rapidly – this year the world is expected to generate 97 zettabytes (ie: 97 trillion gigabytes) of data. By 2025, it could almost double to 181 zettabytes. It is therefore surprising that very little policy attention has been paid to reducing the digital carbon footprint of organizations.
When we talk to people about our work, we find they often assume that digital data, and indeed digitization, is carbon neutral. But that’s not necessarily the case – we’re controlling its carbon footprint for better or for worse. To help reduce this footprint, we introduced the idea of “digital decarbonisation”.
This does not mean that we use phones, computers, sensors and other digital technologies to reduce an organization’s carbon footprint. Instead, we are talking about reducing the carbon footprint of digital data itself. It is important to realize that digitization itself is not an environmental issue, but has huge environmental impacts that depend on how we use digital processes in our day-to-day activities. at the workplace.
To illustrate the importance of dark data, data centers (responsible for 2.5% of all human-generated carbon dioxide) have a larger carbon footprint than the aviation industry (2, first%). To put this into context, we’ve created a tool that can help calculate the carbon cost of data for an organization.
Using our calculations, a typical data-driven business like insurance, retail or banking, with 100 employees, can generate 2,983 gigabytes of dark data per day. If they kept that data for a year, that data would have the same carbon footprint as flying six times from London to New York.
Currently, companies produce 1,300,000,000 gigabytes of dark data every day – that’s 3,023,255 flights from London to New York.
The rapid growth of dark data raises significant questions about the effectiveness of current digital approaches. In a recent study published in the Journal of Business Strategy, we identified ways to help organizations reuse digital data and highlighted pathways for organizations to follow when collecting digital data. collect, process and store new digital data. We hope this can reduce dark data production and contribute to the digital decarbonization movement, which we would all need to be part of if reality were not.
You can even get started on your own by deciding which photos and videos you don’t need anymore. Any file stored on Apple’s iCloud or Google Photos adds to your digital carbon footprint.
