While digital technologies have become a critical tool for reducing emissions within organisations to counter the environmental impact from travel, the growing impact of digitalisation and related data use is often underestimated and represents a risk if not properly considered in climate roadmaps. It is therefore important for organisations to rationalise digital practices and the amount of digital equipment in use to limit their climate impact within organisations, especially as digital energy consumption is growing at a rate of 9% annually.¹⁰⁰

Organisations should:

Devices: Make digital equipment more sustainable.

• Reduce the number of IT devices and extend their lifespan.
• Reduce the impact of IT equipment.
• Properly dispose of IT devices.

Data: Limit the growth of data.

• Limit data growth to reduce energy consumption.

Servers: Reduce the impact of servers.

• Utilise data storage in countries with low carbon electricity.
• Use greener data centres with appropriate certifications/ratings/labels¹⁰¹ and greener cloud service providers.
• Prefer storage of non-essential documents on local devices and use disconnected data storage for backups.