Half of the data generated by firms is collected, processed, and stored for single use. It's never re- used. This could be data from internet of things sensors that have no purpose, a business's outdated spreadsheets that will never be used again, or multiple near-identical images held on a single cloud service.
The dark data is anchored by the energy it requires. Huge banks of computers in warehouses take up a lot of space on the server. A lot of electricity is used by those computers and warehouses.
Most organizations don't know that this is an energy cost. It's a challenge to maintain an effective organizational memory.
Many organizations are trying to reduce their carbon footprints.
Reducing traditional sources of carbon production through mechanisms such as carbon offsetting via third parties has been the focus of guidance.
Climate change activists focus on limiting emissions from the automotive, aviation, and energy industries, but the processing of digital data is already comparable to these sectors.
4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions were claimed to be generated by digital technology in 2020. The world is expected to generate 97 trillion gigabytes of data this year, which is 97 percent of the world's total data output. It could double to 181 Zettabytes by the end of the century.
It is surprising that little attention has been given to the reduction of the digital carbon footprint.
People assume that digital data is carbon neutral when they talk to us. We are in control of it's carbon footprint for better or worse.
The idea of digital decarbonization is to help reduce this footprint. We're not talking about using phones, computers, sensors, and other digital technologies to reduce an organization's carbon footprint. Reducing the carbon footprint of digital data is something we are talking about.
There are huge environmental impacts that depend on how we use digital processes in daily workplace activities.
Data centers have a greater carbon footprint than the aviation industry and are responsible for 2.5% of all human-generated carbon dioxide.
We have created a tool that can help calculate the carbon cost of data.
A typical data-driven business such as insurance, retail, or banking, with 100 employees, could generate over two thousand gigabytes of dark data a day. If they kept that data for a year, it would have the same carbon footprint as a flight from London to New York.
3,023,255 flights from London to New York are involved in the production of 1,300,000,000 gigabytes of dark data.
Questions about the efficiency of current digital practices are raised by the rapid growth of dark data In a recent study published in the Journal of Business Strategy, we identified ways to help organizations reuse digital data, and highlight pathways for organizations to follow when collecting, processing, and storing new digital data.
We hope this can reduce dark data production and contribute to the digital decarbonization movement if net zero is to be achieved.
It is possible to decide which photos and videos you do not need. You add to your digital carbon footprint when you store your files on Apple's or Google's cloud storage services.
Tom Jackson is the Professor of Information and Knowledge Management at the university.
Under a Creative Commons license, this article is re-posted. The original article is worth a read.
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