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 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 interpretations of environmental impact assessment. These can be conducted in parallel with other impact research (e.g. network creation). It might not necessarily be used as a formative assessment (e.g. to predict environmental cost) but a summative assessment afterwards. This might allow, for example, accurate investment into carbon off-setting. This is how we are approaching environmental impact assessment in the Europeana 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 so you can begin to apply this yourself.
The environmental impact of Europeana’s digital services
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/
Add Comment