Assessing environmental impact

Owned by Nicole Mc Neilly
Last updated: Aug 17, 2023
3 min read

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 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 the term environmental impact assessment is used. It can mean the assessment of whether your activity has a positive or negative impact of an activity on the environment. 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 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.

The carbon footprint of convening the sector

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.

Europeana 2019

  • We assessed the environmental cost of air travel to the conference (held in Lisbon). 

  • We emerged with an average environmental cost (carbon outputs) caused by air travel that we could use in the future. 

  • We were able to evaluate whether the off-setting that Europeana invested in was appropriate. The offsetting covered the cost of the air-travel. We did not estimate the other environmental emissions (e.g. caused by hotel stays, the venue that the conference was hosted in, the food eaten by participants, travel by other means than plane e.g. by car or train)

Europeana 2020

  • We attempted to assess the air travel emissions saved by having a fully-digital conference. 

  • We assessed the hypothetical cost of air travel had the conference been held in person. 

  • We calculated a range of environmental emissions that could have been caused by each participant connecting digitally. 

 

Find out more in the impact assessments published on Europeana Pro.

https://pro.europeana.eu/page/impact-case-studies

 

Taken from the Europeana 2021 Impact Assessment (available on Europeana Pro)

The environmental impact of Europeana’s digital services

Read the work we have undertaken, alongside tips that you can try yourself, on Europeana Pro.

https://pro.europeana.eu/post/researching-our-carbon-footprint-findings-and-tips-from-the-europeana-foundation
https://pro.europeana.eu/post/europeana-s-carbon-footprint

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 Digital Cleanup Day

Next steps