should help the understanding of the correlation of ICT and environmental issues.
Sustainability & sustainable development
Sustainability has become an important issue since realizing the problem of climate change. Today industry and economy have to deal with the challenge to combine economic growth with sustainability. For this reason this term has to be specified in more detail. Put simply, sustainability is the ability to sustain, which has its origin in the Latin word sustinere, with the meaning of “to uphold” [1]. Further meanings and related words are “to prolong”, “to keep up”, “to have”, “to nourish” or “to maintain” [2]. By looking at the different acceptations of its derivation (cf. figure 1), the term sustainability can be described as the prolongation or the maintenance of the current state, which today is mostly put into environmental context. Therefore it is the property of keeping natural resources for future generations.In relation to economics, sustainable development is the key issue in the process of achieving sustainability. The most commonly used definition of it comes from a report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in 1987, which is also known as the Brundtland Commission: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” [3]
This definition declares sustainability in terms of human needs and environmental capacity, as goal of sustainable development. The report characterizes these two key concepts as follows [3]:
- “the concept of ’needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and
- the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.”
Figure 1: A map of words related to the
term sustain from the Visual Thesaurus [2]
The capacity of the environment to serve for human needs is not infinite. So achieving sustainability is the challenge to manage and distribute resource consumption and its benefits equitably over space and time, to ensure an equal quality of life for all individuals of current and future generations. This statement can be refined by constituting three dimensions of sustainable development, as it is commonly accepted in literature [4]. Figure 2 represents these three dimensions of economic, social and environmental scope. The figure also shows an additional institutional dimension in the middle of the three dimensions, which holds them together. Institutions, like governance structures, act to combine the requirements of the three dimensions in order to achieve a balanced development [4]. For a sustainable development it is important that non of the three dimensions overweights the others. Each of them has to be respected, which involves avoiding an exploitation of the environment, supporting the abatement of poverty and a positive economic development. This means that there is a minimum standard that has to be reached in each of the three dimensions [4].
Figure 2: The three dimensions of sustainable development [5]
To identify the role of ICT in sustainable development, its potential to enable energy and emissions savings has to be mentioned, which was already described in the section dealing with the main principle dimension of the classification structure. Energy and emissions saving are results of optimization and dematerialization invoked by ICT. This shows that ICT can function as enabling technology to be used in other economic sectors, to support sustainable development.
Energy efficiency
For defining the term energy efficiency a distinction between the different types of energy has to be made. Energy existing in nature, like oil, gas, uranium or sunlight, is called primary energy. To make this natural energy usable for human processes and products it has to be transformed into secondary energy, for example into electricity. Now this is the type of energy that is finally used by devices or systems to serve for human purposes, in other words, to create tertiary energy [6]. To summarize this, there are at least two transformation processes from natural energy to the final purpose of energy usage and each transformation process creates losses. Keeping these losses as small as possible means optimizing efficiency. The transformation process of energy from natural to finally useful energy is shown in figure 3.
Figure 3:
The transformation from primary to secondary to tertiary energy [6]
By energy efficiency usually the efficiency of the process using secondary energy to create a service is meant. In this context energy efficiency is a property of products and processes that determines the ratio of energy used (input) and service created (output). An increase of energy efficiency can therefore be characterized by a reduced input of energy resulting in a constant level of service, or a higher level of service at the same input of energy [7]. In industrial production a measure of this kind of energy efficiency can be defined as “energy use per unit of product” [4]. Beside this there is another measure of efficiency that is possibly more suitable for dealing with the development of a low carbon economy. The carbon efficiency considers the “CO2 emissions per unit of product” [4], which involves the amount of carbon dioxide emissions that arise during the production process and the generation of the needed energy.
However, when dealing with the efficiency of energy usage, one should keep in mind that useful (secondary) energy has to be generated first. For the process of energy generation efficiency is relevant too and can be defined as “the ratio of the useful output energy to the input energy” [6]. Considering the whole transformation process of energy there are three possibilities of reducing primary energy usage [6]:
- “increasing the efficiency of conversion from primary to secondary energy;
- increasing the efficiency of conversion from secondary to tertiary energy;
- reducing tertiary energy demand.”
It is a fact that energy efficiency has become a very important issue in economics and politics, as the global energy demand, as well as the limitations of current energy resources and the environmental impacts of its use will increase. Energy has always been the “key driver for global economic development” [7]. In future there will be limitations in its use, due to the environmental impact of energy generation using fossil fuels and the availability as well as the price of these resources. To uphold economic development in spite of the upcoming restrictions, energy efficiency will be a key factor, because it can serve as “a means to conserve natural resources, to reduce environmental degradation and to save money” [7].
The question is, how an increase of energy efficiency, leading to a non-increasing global energy demand can be achieved, which is a necessary condition for a low carbon economy. Much hope is put on advances in technology that can grant the ability to optimize the consumption of energy resources. Fortunately it is one of the characteristics of ICT to serve as such a technology, that can increase energy efficiency [8]. But it is not certain that the full technological potential will be tapped anyway. It can be assumed that this will mainly be an economic issue, concerning the cost of improvements in energy efficiency relative to energy generation. Since energy generated by fossil fuels still dominates the global energy market and the extraction of them tends to get more expensive, it is supposable that investing in energy efficient technologies will become more attractive to institutions and consumers [7].
Rebound Effect
The actual environmental benefits achieved by improvements in energy efficiency are reduced by the rebound effect. This effect can be characterized as follows: “Increases in demand caused by the introduction of more energy efficient technologies. This increase in demand reduces the energy conservation effect of the improved technology on total resource use.” [8]The enabling effect of ICT to reduce energy consumption also implies decreasing energy costs. These savings could cause a higher investment in ICT by companies, which would lead to an enlarging carbon footprint of the ICT sector. On the other hand the usage of ICT could lead to lower production costs and in consequence to lower product prices, greater purchasing power of consumers and thereby increasing demand [9]. Additionally there is the point, that time that can be saved by using Information Technology could be invested in “higher-carbon activities such as holidays or shopping” [8]. So the rebound effect partly takes back the impact of efficiency gains. There are four different categories of this implication that can be distinguished [10]:
- Direct rebound effect: Higher energy efficiency in producing a service or product leads to lower costs and a lower price. A lower product and service price induces higher demand, leading to increasing production and resource use.
- Indirect rebound effect: Money savings by lower prices of goods and services achieved by energy efficiency cause an increasing consumption of other goods and services. Such implications are called secondary effects.
- Economy-wide effects: Higher energy efficiency could lead lower market prices of energy, due to less energy demand. It is generally excepted that lower energy prices induce faster economic growth and therefore higher resource usage.
- Transformational effects: Advances in technology, like higher energy efficiency, possibly influence the activities and preferences of consumers. This could change global energy demand, but are very hard to predict and explain by studies and research.
Anyway it is the possible impact of the rebound effect that reflects the uncertainty about the extent of the positive environmental effect of the use of ICT. Although there is no complete conformance, studies show that in most cases the total impact of the rebound effect can be considered to be relatively minor from a macro-economic perspective. The determined percentage of reduced energy savings by rebounds differ from 2-3% [11] to around 26% [12]. The rebound from increased energy efficiency can be considered to be less than 30%, but there is no expert consensus on this, because of the “lack of a sound theoretical framework that can explain sufficiently the complex interactions that accompany energy efficiency improvements in the macro-level” and “inconclusive historical, empirical and econometric evidence” [13]. As a conclusion of the impact of the rebound effect regarding energy efficiency it can be stated that it is unlikely that the rebound will take back all of the carbon savings enabled by more energy efficient technology. But in the long run it is quite certain that the increase in global energy demand will be larger than the benefits of improving energy efficiency. This makes “energy efficiency policies [...] short-term policy instruments” [13] and postulates the need for carbon-free energy sources to achieve long-term reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.
Emissions savings
This is a general term for denoting reductions in amounts of emitted greenhouse gases. For easier comparison amounts of emissions and emissions savings are often defined in carbon dioxide equivalents. Therefore the amounts of emissions are calculated as they would just contain carbon dioxide. The notation of carbon dioxide equivalent is CO2e [8].ICT can contribute to emissions savings by providing improvements in energy efficiency and by the approach of dematerialization. The substitution of physical high-carbon products by carbon-free virtual products saves emissions by directly avoiding them. But reductions in emissions can also be directly linked to energy efficiency, as emissions savings often arise as a byproduct of energy efficiency. In this context the question is if energy efficiency improvements achieved by the benefits of ICT will actually lead to emissions savings. This question is represented by the rebound effect. Therefore the actual carbon reductions will depend on the rates of energy efficiency improvements in relation to the growth rates of the global energy demand [7]. From an economic point of view this will be a matter of the development of energy prices and consumer preferences, as these two factors are mainly influencing demand and in consequence energy consumption.
Carbon footprint
The carbon footprint of a person, a product, a service, a company or a whole economic sector determines the amount of total greenhouse gas emissions this unit causes in a defined period of time. In other words a “Carbon footprints represent the amount of carbon [or carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent] emissions associated with a given activity or community” [14]. Therefore it is a ratio that testifies how much impact products and actions have on the environment. The Climate Group defines the term carbon footprint as the “Impact of human activities on the environment measured in terms of GHG produced, measured in CO2e” [8].The concept of the carbon footprint has become to a kind of “common currency for many environmental concerns” [15], although it only considers greenhouse gas emissions, leaving other environmental impacts, like decrease of biodiversity aside. However carbon footprints help to measure and compare the impacts of products and services on contributing to climate change. As an example, the global carbon footprint of the ICT sector in 2007 was 830 MtCO2e [8] (cf. figure 4), which was about 2% of the total global greenhouse gas emissions of that year according to analyst Gartner [16].
Figure 4: The global ICT footprint [8]
Green ICT
The concept of Green ICT is an approach within the ICT sector aiming at increasing the sustainability of its systems. Murugesan (2008) defines Green IT as “the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers, and associated subsystems (such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communications systems) efficiently and effectively with minimal or no impact on the environment” [17]. The Green IT approach can be directly transfered to the combined sector of information and communication technologies, resulting in the term Green ICT. Examples of Green ICT are energy efficient end user systems (thin clients), the substitution of physical systems by virtualization and providing applications and data storage as a network service (cloud computing), to optimize resource usage.The approach of providing more sustainable ICT Systems is important to control the growth of the sectors own carbon footprint. Making ICT Systems green is an attempt to secure the enabling effect of ICT in other sectors. It can avoid that the savings enabled by ICT are invalidated by its own growing emissions.
Enabling technology
In easy words, a technology is an enabling technology if its use implicates some great changes in the abilities of its user [18]. ICT has the potential to enable energy and emissions savings in other industries. This enabling effect of ICT can be specified as “the ability of ICT solutions to facilitate emissions reductions by means of: improved visibility; management and optimisation of processes; and behavioural change as a result of better information provision.” [8]The main role of ICT in a low carbon economy is the function as enabling technology. Although the ICT Industry can directly contribute to lowering greenhouse gas emissions by improving the energy efficiency of their systems, the benefits of new application areas for ICT systems to potentially reduce emissions are assumed to be much larger [19].
References
[1] Dictionary.com. http://dictionary.reference.com/. Accessed: 2013-03-12.[2] Visual Thesaurus. http://www.visualthesaurus.com. Accessed: 2013-03-12.
[3] World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). Our common future: Report of the world commission on environment and development, chapter 2: Towards sustainable development. http://www.un-documents.net/ocf-02.htm, 1987. Accessed: 2013-03-12.
[4] B. Metz. Controlling climate change. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
[5] M. Munasinghe and Munasinghe Institute for Development. Making development more sustainable: sustainomics framework and practical applications. Munasinghe Institute for Development (MIND) series on growth and sustainable development. Munasinghe Institute for Development, 2007.
[6] L.D.D. Harvey. Energy and the new reality 1: Energy Efficiency and the Demand for Energy services. Earthscan, 2010.
[7] B.S. Reddy, G.B. Assenza, F. Hasselmann, and D. Assenza. Energy Efficiency and Climate Change: Conserving Power for a Sustainable Future. Sage Publications, 2010.
[8] The Climate Group. Smart 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age. Technical report, The Climate Group on behalf of the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), 2008.
[9] P.H.G. Berkhout, J.C. Muskens, and J.W. Velthuijsen. Defining the rebound effect. Energy Policy, vol. 28:425–432, 2000.
[10] L.A. Greening, D.L. Greene, and C. Difiglio. Energy efficiency and consumption - the rebound effect - a survey. Energy Policy, vol. 28:389–401, 2000.
[11] J.A. Laitner. Energy efficiency: rebounding to a sound analytical perspective. Energy Policy, vol. 28:471–475, 2000.
[12] T. Barker, P. Ekins, and T. Foxon. The macro-economic rebound effect and the uk economy. Energy Policy, vol. 35:4935–4946, 2007.
[13] J. Dimitropoulos. Energy productivity improvements and the rebound effect: An overview of the state of knowledge. Energy Policy, vol. 35:6354–6363, 2007.
[14] G.R. Cranston and G.P. Hammond. Carbon footprints in a bipolar, climate-constrained world. Ecological Indicators, In Press:Corrected Proof, 2011.
[15] B. Tomlinson. Greening through IT - Information Technology for Environmental Sustainability. The MIT Press, 2010.
[16] S. Mingay. Green IT: A new industry shock wave. http://www.ictliteracy.info/rf.pdf/Gartner_on_Green_IT.pdf. Accessed: 2013-03-12.
[17] S. Murugesan. Harnessing green it: Principles and practices. IT Professional, vol. 10:24–33, 2008.
[18] Business Dictionary. http://www.businessdictionary.com/. Accessed: 2013-03-12.
[19] G. Philipson. Ict’s role in the low carbon economy. Technical report, Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), 2010.
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