Our use of technology can have an impact on carbon emissions. There are simple steps for UK community groups to reduce emissions from everyday technology. Here are 10 ways to reduce your digital footprint.
Storing webpages, photos, videos and emails all comes at an environmental cost – and it’s easy to let things get out of hand. Start by deleting old emails and files, you can concentrate on the larger files first. Regularly unsubscribe from email mailing lists you no longer want and avoid keeping duplicates in the cloud.
AI has enormous environment implications due to the processing power needed for the learning models and AI queries and the rate it is being adopted across the globe. Data centres need to be powered by electricity and cooled by water. Each AI interaction uses vast amount more energy than a simple Google search, this is particularly true of images or video. The numbers are staggering and increasing year on year at a startling rate. However, AI can also save your organisation time and money, so we all have to make decisions about whether or how we use AI – this can be included in your Environmental Policy.
Some easy ways to reduce the impact of AI use include: Only use AI when it is necessary or adds value to what you are doing. Try to ask all the questions in one prompt, be specific so you don’t have to ask repeated times. Keep requests short and clear, you can include the words ‘short answer’ in your prompt or your AI parameters. Where you can turn off auto-generated features you don’t need and don’t use AI for creating images or video.
There are also language models which have a smaller carbon footprint such as GreenGPT (free) and GreenPT (subscription).
You can use website hosting powered by renewable energy – you can check how clean your website is in terms of carbon emissions here. Only use video calls when you need to – you can turn off your video or use lower quality. You can reduce your environmental impact with a green browser. Ecosia plants trees every time someone uses its search engines, gives 100% of its profits for the planet, and is developing less energy intensive AI models.