Anastasiya Pak talks to Professor Wim Vanderbauwhede - lead of the Low Carbon and Sustainable Computing activity at the School of Computing Science of the University of Glasgow - about the carbon footprint of the ICT industry, misleading narratives around digitalisation, and why the notion of frugal computing is needed to move forward.
05:49 – The split of ICT emissions - 54% home, 19% data centres, 27% networks - is taken from the \"Carbon impact of video streaming\" white paper by the Carbon Trust, 2021.
07:13 – Problems with the claims about emission avoidance through digitalisation are discussed in \"Digital Rebound – Why Digitalization Will Not Redeem Us Our Environmental Sins\", Vlad C. Coroamă and Friedemann Mattern, 2019.
26:00 - The limited potential for offsetting of emission through biomass is discussed in \"There aren’t enough trees in the world to offset society’s carbon emissions – and there never will be\", Bonnie Waring, 2023.
34:37 – Wim discusses the notion of Frugal Computing in more detail in in his position paper \"Frugal computing – On the need for low-carbon and sustainable computing and the path towards zero-carbon computing\". A more academic version is available here.
37:09 - The potential for efficiency gains through better software is discussed in \"There’s plenty of room at the Top: What will drive computer performance after Moore’s law?\", Charles E. Leiserson et al.
","author_name":"RIPE Labs Editor"}