How sustainable are virtual meetings?
The pandemic has forced us all in front of the monitors and thus turned us into climate protectors, because virtual meetings cause much less CO2 than traveling. Or is that perhaps not true at all? Text: Lorenz Hilty
At two to four percent, the IT sector now accounts for a similar share of global greenhouse gas emissions as air travel. And video is the most energy-intensive thing you can do in the digital world when you're not training models or mining Bitcoins. I can't type the amount of data a video camera generates in an hour on a keyboard in ten working years. Still, it would be wrong to turn off the camera and get back on the plane. A virtual meeting produces 160-290 grams of greenhouse gas emissions per hour, and a flight to New York and back produces 2.5 tons per passenger. Only if I had to confer with New York for two hours a day for twelve years would a single flight be worthwhile.
This apparent contradiction to the statement about global emissions can be explained by the number of people using the Internet.
62 percent of people have access to the Internet, but only three percent fly at least once a year. If air travel were to "democratize" to the same extent as the Internet, the fight against climate change would already be lost. I can also use digital technology in a climate-conscious way. In the case of end devices, most of the climate impact is caused by production. So buy something new less often. And resist the temptation to make excessive use of seemingly unlimited capacities in the cloud. Because this has an impact on the size and energy consumption of the data centers.
Text: Lorenz Hilty (Professor at the Department of Computer Science and sustainability delegate at UZH)
Source: Oec. Magazine issue #17