Why sustainable digital research matters

Last updated on 2026-04-15 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

What are the “net zero” goals?
What is digital research?
Why is minimising “carbon to science” important?

Objectives

Explain the big picture for reducing carbon emissions
Explain how that applies to digital research

Environmental sustainability

Environmental sustainability refers to the need for human activity to be balanced with the long term health of the planet and availability of natural resources. There are many issues that can impact environmental sustainability:

The most pressing sustainability challenge facing the world is the emission of greenhouse gases driving the climate emergency. For this reason we will primarily focus on greenhouse gas emissions, in particular we’ll focus on the metric Kilograms Carbon Dioxide Equivalent (kgCO₂e). This is a simplified metric that aims to represent the impact of a range of greenhouse gases as a single figure by expressing them as an equivalent emitted quantity of Carbon Dioxide (CO₂).

The context of net zero goals

Climate change and global warming have become pressing issues in recent years. A primary cause of these phenomena is the increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases (for example, carbon dioxide) are responsible for trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, leading to rising global temperatures. These gases are emitted from various human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial processes.

To combat this, many countries, including the UK have set “net zero” goals. Net zero refers to the balance between the amount of greenhouse gases emitted and the amount removed from the atmosphere. The way to achieve net zero is by reducing emissions as much as possible and decarbonising activities. The UK plans to reach net zero by 2050.

Callout

Carbon neutral vs net zero

The terms carbon neutral and net zero are often used interchangeably, but they have different meanings. They both refer to removing harmful emissions from the atmosphere, but the kind of emissions removed and the scale are different.

Carbon neutral requires taking action to reduce carbon emissions and offsetting any remaining emissions, of a given activity. Offsetting is the process of compensating for carbon emissions by investing in projects that reduce or remove an equivalent amount of carbon from the atmosphere, such as planting trees or investing in renewable energy projects. Usually organisations would first begin by reducing their carbon emissions as much as possible, and then offset the remaining emissions. For example, monitoring the carbon intensity of the electricity being used can help identify the best times to use energy, and hence reduce the carbon emissions.
Net zero refers to the balance between the amount of “all” the greenhouse gases (like carbon dioxide, methane or sulphur dioxide) emitted and the amount removed from the atmosphere. Hence, achieving net zero has a much wider scope and requires going further than just reducing carbon emissions.

The role of digital research

Amongst the various sources of greenhouse gas emissions, digital research is one of the contributors. Digital research involves a wide range of activities, including the use of software for data analysis, simulations, machine learning, and the use of cloud computing resources. All these activities often require significant computational power and data storage resources. Providing these digital resources requires significant production of computer hardware and leads to significant electricity consumption. Both of these aspects can lead to substantial carbon emissions.

The ICT contributions to global carbon emissions in 2007 was estimated in 1.3%, and a more recent study increases this number to 4.1% in 2021. But more striking are the predictions that ICT global emissions will reach over 14% in 2040.

While digital research will always be a fraction of all of these emissions, the UKRI Net Zero DRI Scoping Project final technical report suggests a very challenging scenario in the years to come if carbon emissions are to be kept at bay with the growing demand for energy in digital-related activities in research. For the UKRI alone, the estimated carbon emissions of digital research are 75 kilotons of CO2e per year, with 40 kilotons corresponding to large scale compute facilities and the remaining 35 kilotons related to servers, laptops and small equipment.

Digital research is important for scientific progress and has the potential to contribute to solving many of the global challenges, including climate change. However, it is necessary to ensure that the carbon emissions associated with digital research are minimised. As we will learn in the following episodes, there is not a single, big carbon producer in digital research that we can eliminate without hindering the research activity, but a myriad small activities, practices, tools and processes that, while individually do not represent a big challenge, their sheer amount results in the above estimates.

As researchers, we have a responsibility to consider the environmental impact of our work and take steps to reduce it. This begins with mindful computing, a term which describes a more concious approach to planning, running and managing digital tasks to ensure that scientific advances don’t produce more emissions than needed. Adopting this mindset could look different to everyone. For example, choosing a datacenter in a region powered by renewable energy can significantly reduce a project’s carbon footprint. Another example is storage data management, where small steps such as deleting unused data or compressing data can reduce the carbon associated with long-term storage. Mindful computing can also be applied to analyses tasks, by using incremental processing or requesting the right GPU/CPU resources when using High Performance Computing.

As researchers, we have a responsibility to consider the environmental impact of our work and take steps to reduce it. Hence, the purpose of this course is to explore how to measure and estimate the carbon emissions from digital research activities, what are the sources of these emissions, and what are some ways to reduce them.