Transparency

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Transparency is a core tenant of the SDIA’s agenda at the moment. The absence of reliable data & facts on the digital economy is hindering adequate action plans to reduce the negative impacts and thus maximize the positive potential of the digital realm.

We advocate for transparency with the goals:

to have an understanding of negative impacts of digital sector and develop plans to mitigate them

to unlock the information required for scientific inquiry & fact-based policy-making

to create a competitive advantage for companies that are transparent about the environmental & social impacts of their business

Why we focus on environmental impact for now

There is already an absence of facts on the environmental impact of the digital sector as whole. However, at least there are existing frameworks and impact indicators that have been developed in other sectors and can applied for digital products as well (e.g. Life Cycle Assessment).

We strongly advocate for developing similar frameworks for social impact (such as Social Life Cycle Assessment, or S-LCA) because we feel the current frameworks are not mature and are complex to apply for the digital sector. We are open to collaborate with scholars and industry to advance the field of social impact measurements in the digital sector.

Transparency of the digital sector

There is an important detail in advocating for transparency that needs to be highlighted. The digital economy, as the first part, consists of some very large, global digital products, e.g. YouTube, Instagram or Zalando. These are significantly different in terms of scale than traditional enterprise IT applications or most application utilized to digitalize business or government.

Yet, in the mental model of the SDIA, both need to make the environmental impact of their usage transparent to the person or organization that is using the digital product. The only distinction is that digital economy actors (large digital product companies such as Uber, Google, etc.) also need to be transparent towards society as they are operating in the public sphere and have both environmental & social impacts.

A simplified model for the digital sector

Our simplified school-of-thought is centered on the idea that there is a digital resource, which has an environmental impact stemming from the energy & materials of the computers producing it. The digital resource is allocated & consumed to provide a service (e.g. streaming 1 minute of video) and hence this usage can be attributed a ‘resource usage’ and associated environmental impact.

User - any person, customer, organization utilizing a software application (which can be a digital product sold/as-a-service or a custom-build internal application)

A software application which is providing a service made from digital resources to the user.

Examples: ERP System within a Corporate, Ticket Purchasing Application for Public Transparent, a Social Network, a Video Streaming App

Resource provisioning allocates the digital resources to the software applications.

Examples: Cloud Infrastructure Providers, Web Hosting Companies, Virtualization Software Manufacturers, Internet Providers

Digital infrastructure is producing digital resources by employing computers, which are housed in data centers and connected through networks.

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You can read more about digital resource in our glossary and digital environmental footprint.

Who needs to be transparent about what

With our model it is straightforward to assign responsibilities on transparency to the different actors.

Digital infrastructure actors need to be transparent about how many digital resources are produced with the environmental impact per unit.

Resource provisioning actors need to be transparent about how many resources could not be allocated & used (and hence are wasted), as well as pass-through the environmental impact per resource to the software application

Software applications need to transform the digital resource usage they create into environmental impact (using the information provided by the resource provisioning actors) and make it transparent to the user, creating transparency on the usage-based impact

Some examples:

In our view:

YouTube

An SAP ERP

Environmental Impact Indicators

We have selected the relevant environmental impact indicators from the Life Cycle Assessment Framework (EN15804 +A2) for digital resources and listed them on our 📓Digital Environmental Footprint page.