Digital Infrastructure and Climate Change
Resources about the mutual impacts of the climate and our physical digital infrastructure
The Cloud Is Material: On the environmental impacts of computation and data storage
Summary
An anthropological study of the material and labor intensive realities of cloud computing and storage infrastructure which, “now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry,” and the environmental impacts of this infrastructure at local and global scales. Includes discussion questions, references, and further resources.
Use of water and cooling for data centers impacts water scarcity.
Data centers are loud contributing to “sound pollution” lowering quality of life.
Links to interesting resources: https://www.websitecarbon.com/
Key Points
Energy intensity: “the Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of fifty thousand homes. At 200 terawatt hours (TWh) annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states. Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2 percent of global carbon emissions.”
Intensive cooling systems burdening energy infrastructure and exacerbating potable water scarcity:
Air-based: “data centers overwhelmingly rely on air conditioning… so that it can displace or lift perilous heat away from computers… cooling accounts for greater than 40 percent of electricity usage.”
Water-based: “chilled water is piped through the latticework of server racks to more efficiently cool the facility, liquid being a superior convective agent than air. This shift from cooling air to cooling water is an attempt to reduce carbon footprint, but it comes at a cost. Weathering historic drought and heat domes, communities in the western United States are increasingly strained for water resources.”
Noise pollution: “Over vast distances, the sonic exhaust of our digital lives reverberates: the minute vibrations of hard disks, the rumbling of air chillers, the cranking of diesel generators, the mechanical spinning of fans… the computational whir of data centers is not merely an annoyance, but a source of mental and physical harm,” including anxiety, hypertension, and elevated blood pressure and stress hormone levels. “Because data center noise is unregulated by political authorities, facilities can be built in close proximity to residential communities.”
Material waste: “a single desktop computer requires 240 kilograms of fossil fuels, 22 kilograms of chemicals, and 1,500 kilograms of water to manufacture… metals [used in manufacturing], many of which are toxic and contain radioactive elements, take millennia to decay… environmental organizations like Greenpeace estimate that less than 16 percent of the tons of e-waste generated annually is recycled”
Relevance to Digital Stewardship
The physical environmental impacts of digital preservation activities, including redundancy mean that “the data center is a Russian doll of redundancies: redundant power systems like diesel generators, redundant servers ready to take over computational processes should others become unexpectedly unavailable, and so forth. In some cases, only 6–12 percent of energy consumed is devoted to active computational processes. The remainder is allocated to cooling and maintaining chains upon chains of redundant fail-safes to prevent costly downtime.”
There will be longitudinal impacts across hardware and infrastructural lifecycles, from manufacturing to disposal, which entails implications for hardware refreshment, procurement, and redundancy.
Source
MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing publish “specially commissioned and peer-reviewed cases” on particular technologies, cross-sector trends, and critical examinations of computing activities.
Full Citation
Monserrate, S. G. (2022). The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage. MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, Winter 2022. https://doi.org/10.21428/2c646de5.031d4553
Lights Out: Climate change risk to internet infrastructure
Summary
This article assesses risks to internet infrastructure in the United States due to sea level rise by mapping sea level rise projections with the locations of coastal internet infrastructure between 2030 and 2100. The study finds that risks to internet infrastructure reach their height once sea levels rise by one foot, which is predicted to occur in 2030.
Key Points
Internet infrastructure involves fiber optic strands and conduits (fiber optic cables along which data is transferred), nodes (for receiving, processing, and distributing data), and termination points (facilitating end-user access to the internet).
Fiber optic cables: Unless deployed in hostile environments such as along the seabed, fiber strands are typically protected by plastic resin conduits and laid in buried trenches or with existing underground systems. While designed to be weather and water resistant, fiber optic cables are not intended to be submerged in water as they are prone to water-based damage—including seepage, corrosion, freezing, and signal interruptions and outages.
Nodes and termination points: In the United States, many nodes, and by extension the termination points to which they connect, are located near tidally active regions. This infrastructure is therefore susceptible to “physical damage by tidal inundation and corrosion leading to signal loss.”
“The results of our analysis show that climate change related sea level incursions could have a devastating impact on Internet communication infrastructure even in the relatively short term. In particular, we find that 1,186 miles of long-haul fiber conduit and 2,429 miles of metro fiber conduit will be underwater in the next 15 years.”
Relevance to Digital Preservation
“We observe that infrastructures in the coastal cities are the most vulnerable assets in the Internet”: sea level rise will have critical impacts on internet connectivity with wide ranging implications for creating, acquiring, stabilizing, processing, managing, and providing access to digital collections
Source
The Applied Networking Research Workshop “is an academic workshop that provides a forum for researchers, vendors, network operators, and the Internet standards community to present and discuss emerging results in applied networking research, and to find inspiration from topics and open problems discussed at the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force].” The workshop is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery and the Internet Research Task Force.
Full Citation
Durairajan, R., Barford, C., & Barford, P. (2018). Lights Out: Climate Change Risk to Internet Infrastructure. Proceedings of the 2018 Applied Networking Research Workshop, 9–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3232755.3232775
Research Project on Climate Change and Archives - Phase 2: Infrastructure
Summary
This report covers concerns related to the storage, preservation, and accessibility of archives in the face of climate change-caused pressure on infrastructure. The author “conducted research related to facilities, digital infrastructure, and emergency preparedness/disaster response. [The author] sought to understand and contextualize the current and anticipated infrastructure concerns in the American archival profession and what this means for archives’ capacity for climate change adaptation.”
The other phases of the report are Phase 1 (People) and Phase 3 (Collections).
Key Points
“There are widely recognized energy efficiency guidelines for cultural collecting institutions, but many archives face challenges in adopting these standards.”
“Many archives report they are at physical collections storage capacity, and yet also do not have all of their collections fully inventoried and accessible. Many archives are engaged in working with digital collections, and do not have a digital preservation plan.”
“The full extent of disaster-related archival losses are unknown. Reporting on disaster losses is key to driving both internal and external support for emergency preparedness and disaster recovery.”
“Since 60% of electricity in the United States is derived from fossil fuels, this means that digital preservation activities performed at the highest level are likely to have a larger carbon footprint than lower levels of digital preservation. On the other hand, higher levels of digital preservation may protect content from major disasters such as a power grid failure or major disaster that affects data centers. “
Relevance to Digital Preservation
The report directly addresses issues faced by archival institutions when it comes to their digital collections. Infrastructure is an integral part of digital preservation with elements such as storage, maintenance, and access activities all relying on infrastructure both on-site and off-site. Infrastructure is at risk when it comes to the increased frequency of disasters.
Source
This report was written by Memory Rising as part of the Public Knowledge program of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Founded by Eira Tansey, “Memory Rising provides research, consulting, and archival services for cultural and humanities institutions and other organizations.” The methodology for this report was an “extensive review and analysis of published and informal research on infrastructure.”
Full Citation
Tansey, Eira. (2024). Research Project on Climate Change and Archives: Phase 2: Infrastructure. https://memoryrising.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/MellonFoundation-MemoryRising_ArchivesClimateChange_PublicPhase2Report_2024-12-20.pdf
Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty: A roadmap to build a digital stack for people and the planet
Summary
This policy paper calls for an overhaul of the global ecosystem of digital infrastructure to shift away from a private, monopolized, profit-oriented model towards a public system grounded in democratic digital sovereignty, public interest, and environmental protection. The paper outlines seven proposals for reforming the current ecosystem with public digital infrastructure and services to enhance cooperation, autonomy, transparency, and accountability for citizens and the environment.
The full report is available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Key Points
Democratic digital sovereignty is defined as the “capacities [of states and their people] to steer the development of science and technology” in order to “access, understand, and produce technology that truly improves their lives.”
“Any technology that puts people, the planet, and democracy first requires that private economic gains take the back seat.”
The dominance of Big Tech in the development and deployment of digital technologies affords these companies outsized and non-transparent influence in critical areas, including the environment, government, policy and regulation, the economy, access to information, civic participation, and more. The consequences are often non-trivial and global in scale.
The strategies outlined include public infrastructure and research networks for digital technologies that focus on “people and planetary priorities”; policies and regulation that expand human and civil rights protections in the digital space; and market reforms to improve labor conditions, corporate accountability, and environmental protections.
Implementing these strategies requires coordination and concerted effort among and between communities and states to create a “public, international, and ecological public-led stack” and “an expansion of citizens’ education on the risks, limitations, and effects of digital technologies.”
Relevance to Digital Preservation
This paper supports digital stewardship professions with understanding the larger digital infrastructure ecosystem in which digital preservation tools and systems operate, and the crosscutting impacts of the current ecosystem on society and the environment. Aligning with many of our professional values, the proposals also outline ways in which governments and communities, including the digital stewardship community, can adapt and reform infrastructure to better honor the environment and public interest.
Source
This resource is published by the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London. The Institute is an interdisciplinary department that tackles the complex relationships between economic, technological and social changes, covering four cross-cutting pillars of inquiry.
Full citation
Rikap, C., Durand, C., Gerbaudo, P., Marx, P., & Paraná, E. (2024). Reclaiming digital sovereignty. UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2024/dec/reclaiming-digital-sovereignty