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M101c - Costs&Benefits of Digital Technologies: Author: Prof. Dr. Meltem Ucal, KHAS, Turkey Ceren Takımlı, KHAS, Turkey

This document discusses the costs and benefits of digital technologies. It provides biographies of the authors, Prof. Dr. Meltem Ucal and Ceren Takımlı. It then covers the impacts of digitalization on sustainability, including how producing digital devices requires significant energy and resources. Individual digital footprints can be reduced by limiting online activities like video streaming and social media use. Organizations are also encouraged to pursue clean IT solutions and use renewable energy to reduce their carbon footprints.

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50 views18 pages

M101c - Costs&Benefits of Digital Technologies: Author: Prof. Dr. Meltem Ucal, KHAS, Turkey Ceren Takımlı, KHAS, Turkey

This document discusses the costs and benefits of digital technologies. It provides biographies of the authors, Prof. Dr. Meltem Ucal and Ceren Takımlı. It then covers the impacts of digitalization on sustainability, including how producing digital devices requires significant energy and resources. Individual digital footprints can be reduced by limiting online activities like video streaming and social media use. Organizations are also encouraged to pursue clean IT solutions and use renewable energy to reduce their carbon footprints.

Uploaded by

maia maia
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We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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M101c - Costs&Benefits of Digital Technologies

Author: Prof. Dr. Meltem Ucal, KHAS, Turkey


Ceren Takımlı, KHAS, Turkey
Author’s biography
• Meltem Ucal is a professor of economics at the Department of Economics,
Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey. She has taught and performed
research and outreach for over 20 years. She received her BA, MA, and
PhD, all in Econometrics. She continued PhD program at University of
South Florida in the USA. She has lectured on Econometrics at the
Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft and Zeppelin Universität at various
times. She has also been shortly visiting as a visiting scholar in various EU
countries (e.g., Belgium, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Denmark, Portugal,
Ireland). Professor Ucal manages international prestigious projects, some
of them are UNDP, H2020 MSCA-RISE and others EU project and she is
involved in various projects as a referee such as ERANET-Plus, H2020-
Energy Calls, H2020-COST Action, TUBITAK (Science and Technology
Council of Turkey) as well. She has received an academic outstanding
achievement award for 2020 from Kadir Has University. She received
another academic award due to her successful project on energy issues in
2017 for “Energy Efficiency” delivered by the Istanbul Chamber of
Industry. She has published more than 30 articles in prestigious academic
journals. Her recent research interests include, energy economics (energy
poverty, efficiency, consumption) and labor force participation, green
growth & sustainable development, gender gap and income inequality,
applied econometrics, raising awareness for mobbing.
Author’s biography

• Ceren Takımlı graduated from Yıldız


Technical University, Department of
Political Science and International
Relations in 2017. After a year of
working on gender equality projects
under the Sabancı University Corporate
Governance Forum, she started her
master's degree in Political Science and
Public Administration at Kadir Has
University. While continuing to work on
gender during her master's degree, she
also focused on climate change and
energy efficiency. She is currently
working as an assistant specialist in a
private institution, spesifically working
on ESG project implementation.
Introduction
• The aim of this presentation is to introduce learners to the impact of digital technologies
and how the digital technologies can be employed to help the tackle climate crisis.

• Learning Outcomes

• Identify the carbon footprint of the production of personal used digital devices' (mobile phone, laptop
etc.)
• Identify the energy consumption of personal use of digital services;
Keywords
• Digital Carbon footprint: The total greenhouse gas emissions caused by digital systems,
expressed as carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e).Climate Change
• Energy Efficiency: The ration between the useful output and input of energy conversion
process.
• Digital Device: A device based on electronic representation of Boolean logic functions.
Digitalization and Sustainability /1
Digital technologies are essential for economic and social development. The digital
transition appears to be critical for countries and companies with digital objects and
interfaces gradually becoming part of every aspect of our social life. The digital transition
is also considered to be a key tool to reduce energy consumption in many sectors ("IT for
Green"), to such an extent that it now hardly seems possible to address climate change
without the large scale incorporation of digital technologies.
However, direct and indirect environmental impacts (rebound effects) related to the
growing use of digital are constantly underestimated, due to devices’ miniaturization and
the "invisibility" of the related infrastructures. There is a real risk of a scenario in which
increasingly massive investments in digital technologies would contribute to a net increase
of digitalized sectors’ carbon footprint– which has in practice been the case for more than a
decade.
Digitalization and Sustainability /2
We live in a world where energy-gulping digital infrastructures and products are
developing beyond control. The energy consumption of Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) is increasing by 9% every year, and already accounts in 2018 for 3.7% of
global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
The digital transition as it is currently implemented participates to global warming
more than it helps preventing it. The need for action is therefore urgent.

The environmental impact of digitalisation becomes manageable if it is leaner, and it


is possible to limit this growth to 1.5% per year by moving to sober digital practices - as this
report proves. While high income countries alone bear the responsibility of
overconsumption, we must recover our individual and collective abilities to challenge the
social and economic benefits of both our purchasing and consumptions behaviours of digital
objects and services.
Impacts of Digitalization /1
It impacts the carbon emissions in three ways;

• Direct carbon emissions associated with production, manufacturing, use and disposal
(ICT’s carbon footprint)
• Indirect positive or negative emission effects from using technology(e.g. travel
substitution and transportation optimization)
• Impacting behaviours and preferences (reshaping how we lead our lives on a societal
level)
Impacts of Digitalization /2
Producing a smartphone weighing 140
grams (approximately 0.3086 lb) demands
about 0.700 GJ of primary energy whereas,
according to ADEME, about 85 GJ to produce a
gasoline powered car weighing 1,400 kg
(approximately 3,086 lb). Therefore, it is
necessary to consume 80 times more energy to
produce "a gram of smartphone" than to
produce "a gram of car". It is noteworthy that
miniaturization also increases energy
consumption during recycling, since the energy
needed to separate the metals increases as a
function of the complexity of the assembly.
Impacts of Digitalization /3
The digital transition currently generates a strong increase in the direct energy
footprint of ICT. This footprint includes the energy for the production and the use of
equipment which is increasing rapidly, by 9% per year (servers, networks, terminals).

The capture of a gradually disproportionate part of


available electricity increases the demand on electric
production, which already struggles to decarbonize. The share
of digital technologies in global greenhouse gas emissions has
increased by half since 2013, from 2.5% to 3.7% of global
emissions. The demand for raw materials such as rare and
critical metals, essential for both digital and low-carbon
energy technologies, is also growing.
Click here
for more
information;
Impacts of Digitalization /5
Individual and public measures taken due to the pandemic have increased the
use of the internet and social media, along with the digital footprint. Every second we
spend online and every transaction we make in the digital environment triggers the climate
crisis and harms the planet with the carbon emissions it causes.

The explosion of video uses


(Skype, streaming, etc.) and the
increased consumption of short-
lifespan digital equipment are the
main drivers of this inflation.
Click here;
Reducing Individual Digital Footprint /1
While personal use represents a small part of the footprint of digital technologies, this can also
be reduced by personal measures.
• Limiting e-mail sending.
• Regulating video watching habits: Every 10 minutes of watching releases 1 gram of CO2.
• Reducing the use of social media: With 500 million tweets sent daily, a total of 10 metric tons of
CO2 is emitted. ( posting tweets, sharing selfies, live streamings.
• Reading news: The Guardian's extensive 2012 study of the carbon footprint associated with
producing your own content found that using a laptop to read an article emits the same amount of
CO2 as five 11W light bulbs.
• Turning off the camera in online meetings or conversations can reduce carbon emissions by 96%.
• One of the ways to offset the carbon footprint is to plant trees. There are also those who say that
billions of searches performed on Google in a day constitute about 40% of the carbon footprint of
the entire internet. Therefore, instead of using the Google search engine, you can choose Ecosia.
Ecosia plants a tree for every search made on the platform.
Digital Cleaning: Storing useless
digital data, emails, photos and similar
data on our devices and cloud services
has consequences.

https://www.digitalcleanupday.org/
Reducing Carbon Footprint for Organizations /1
Reducing their carbon footprint is the duty of every organization to the planet. The ICT
sector’s carbon footprint could be reduced by over 80 percent if all electricity consumed came
from renewable energy sources. But regardless of the sector, it is very important for our future
that companies follow carbon neutral-carbon negative policies. To reduce the energy
requirements of computer systems it is necessary to;

• Raise awareness about the energy footprint of computer systems


• Find feasible methods to measure the energy consumption of computer systems and software
• Take the trade-off between performance and energy consumption into account when creating
computer systems
• Rethink IT architectures and algorithms
Reducing Carbon Footprint for Organizations /2

• Establish algorithmic efficiency and sustainability by design as guiding principles in digital


engineering
• Apply clean-IT solutions on a broad scale in popular services and products
• You can use a sustainable website for your organization. It is also possible for us to choose
greener options for hosting service.
• Changing the way we train neural networks.
• Using environmentally friendly compute capabilities
Thank you for your attention!

Contact and further information


Please refer to the Good DEEDs website (https://gooddeeds-learn.eu)

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