The Pays Basque Digital Cluster hosted a conference on the environmental footprint of the digital world as well as civic-minded practices that companies can adopt to reduce their footprint.A Q&A session and testimony from a local company rounded out the conference presided by Frédéric Bordage, a green computing expert.  

Some one hundred people attended the event organized at ESTIA last January 16th on the initiative of the Pays Basque Digital Cluster. In attendance were members of the cluster grouping together companies from the Basque Country and the Adour Basin specialized in software development and value-added digital services as well as students, business owners and stakeholders in the Basque Country’s technology ecosystem. Frédéric Bordage – founder and host of the GreenIT.fr community that connects actors of green computing – moderated the conference, which was opened by Marie Jo Burucoa, the Pays Basque Digital Cluster chairperson.

Frédéric Bordage presented the figures from an October 2019 study on the environmental footprint of the digital world. With the manufacture of electronic hardware on top of the electricity consumed by the 34 billion computer systems and data centers now in service, the digital environmental footprint is equal to that of a continent two to three times bigger than France. Computing contributes to the depletion of unrenewable natural resources and global warming. “So the challenge is not just limited to reducing our environmental impacts, but also to our well-reasoned usage: it is now a question of resilience for humanity,” Frédéric Bordage.

Although the figures are upsetting, simple measures and solutions would make it possible to substantially reduce the digital world’s environmental footprint by 2025, according to him. Among those measures, the expert listed reducing the number of connected objects, increasing product lifetimes or even eco-designing digital services. Good actions and good practices aimed at reducing the digital footprint were discussed by Frédéric Bordage, and by Patrick Bourg, Operations Director at Belharra Numérique who commented on the eco-responsible actions carried out by his company, a member of the Pays Basque Digital Cluster.

Find out more: https://www.greenit.fr

Download the study on the environmental footprint of the digital world here: https://www.greenit.fr/empreinte-environnementale-du-numerique-mondial/