Traditionally, ‘environmental impact assessments’ (EIA) are understood as a process or activity usually conducted before moving forward with a plan. You can think of it like a risk assessment, where the risk is focussed focused on the environment: what will the consequences for the environment be? This might be used before building a new building or moving to a new data server, for example.
There are also other ways that we use the term environmental impact assessment is used. These can be conducted in parallel with other impact research (e.g. network creation) to assess the It can mean the assessment of whether your activity has a positive or negative impact of an activity on the environment, before or after the activity took place. This is how we are approaching environmental impact assessment in the Europeana Impact Playbook.
Work into understanding Europeana’s broader environmental impact started back in 2018 when , during a hack week, a team set the goal to better understand the carbon footprint of Europeana’s digital services. Since then, we have moved forward to also assess the impact of our annual conferences in 2019, 2020 and 2021, whether online or in person.
Methodologies for calculating environmental impact are beginning to mature. Here we share the approach that we have taken as an option for you to take a similar approach yourself.
The environmental impact of Europeana’s digital services
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Inspiration: Digital Cleanup Day movement
Our digital files, photos, videos, apps, etc, all create a digital carbon footprint. The Digital Cleanup Day encourages people worldwide to do some ‘spring cleaning’ of our digital trash, that is, the duplicates that we forget about, the apps we don’t use, the files we don’t need.
The environmental cost of data is growing in parallel with the digital transformation of the world around us. We can each do our bit to reduce our data carbon footprint.
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The carbon footprint of convening the sector
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As part of Europeana’s 2019 and 2020 annual conferences, we assessed their environmental impact as physical and digital conferences respectively. You can read more about each impact assessment on Europeana Pro but here we share our approach and methodology. We might think that a digital conference has no environmental impact - after all, there is no travel. But this is not the case. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we held Europeana 2020 online and calculated what the scale of its carbon footprint was likely to be. We compared this against the carbon footprint of air travel to Europeana 2019. In all of this, we had to develop our own methodologies, so each finding is an estimate and over time the methodology is likely to improve.
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The environmental impact of Europeana’s digital services
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Inspiration: Digital Cleanup Day movement Our digital files, photos, videos, apps, etc, all create a digital carbon footprint. The Digital Cleanup Day encourages people worldwide to do some ‘spring cleaning’ of our digital trash, that is, the duplicates that we forget about, the apps we don’t use, the files we don’t need. The environmental cost of data is growing in parallel with the digital transformation of the world around us. We can each do our bit to reduce our data carbon footprint. Find out more at the Digital Cleanup Day homepage https://www.digitalcleanupday.org/ |
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