The digital sector is often considered “immaterial,” yet it is far from it: the carbon and energy impacts of devices, networks, and data centers are rising—much faster than in other sectors. Making digital technology an ally of decarbonization, rather than an additional challenge, is not automatic: we must rethink infrastructures, their scale, and the usage dynamics they foster.
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AI : “We need ecological planning for digital technology over 5, 10, and 25 years.”
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Virtual worlds and Networks facing the dual carbon constraints
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Environmental impacts of digital technology : 5-year trends and 5G governance
14 Oct. 2020|Report
Deploying Digital Sobriety
Digital emissions come not only from usage, but also from the production chain of equipment—mining, industrial processing, component manufacturing, assembly, transport, and delivery.
The true climate value of digital solutions (connected lighting, smart logistics, AI, etc.) can only be assessed on a case-by-case basis, through rigorous analysis that accounts for indirect effects and production impacts.
Digital services are expanding globally at high speed. In energy-intensive regions such as Europe, the electricity consumed by networks, data centers, and AI competes with other sectors—and with the energy transition itself.
Digital growth is driven both by massive infrastructure deployment (4G, 5G, AI data centers) enabling new services, and by the widespread adoption of those services (video streaming, chatbots, etc.), which in turn justify infrastructure expansion. Managing digital’s footprint requires action on both infrastructures (eco-design, efficiency, scaling) and usages (service design, consumption behavior, sobriety).
Each individual action has a negligible footprint, yet multiplied by billions of users and increasingly intensive layers of use (text → images → video → AI → constant connectivity), they create a significant global impact—often hidden within infrastructures and invisible to any single economic actor.
3 to 4 %
1 tenth
3/4
90 %
Building a reference trajectory for “Digital goods and services” within France’s National Low-Carbon Strategy (SNBC) would provide a quantitative benchmark for decision-making—on service deployment, admissible infrastructure, and strategic trade-offs.
Service providers and equipment manufacturers must systematically disclose impact data across the entire lifecycle (manufacture, transport, use, end-of-life), with full detail on assumptions (upstream phases, electricity consumption, carbon intensities). This transparency is essential for robust analysis, informed infrastructure decisions, and compatibility with carbon constraints.
Energy and carbon efficiency improvements (e.g. more efficient devices, optimized cooling in data centers, server virtualization) are necessary. Yet, without demand-side management, such gains are often erased by rebound effects, increasing overall impacts.
Transforming usage patterns and economic models is critical to make them resilient under physical constraints. Otherwise, those constraints will impose themselves.
Widespread training on climate-energy issues and their digital implications is essential. Organizations must develop competencies in eco-design, sober digital service design, and economic models decoupled from ever-growing data volumes.
A new governance for digital
Steering digital onto a sustainable trajectory requires robust governance that accounts for rebound effects and clearly distinguishes resilient digitization from non-resilient expansion. This calls for coordinated action:
Public authorities and regulators: by setting reference trajectories and rules.
Economic actors: by building profitability models beyond volume growth.
Service designers: by creating digital environments that foster sobriety rather than addiction.