This article is written by Tom Greenwood, Managing Director of Wholegrain Digital. This article is the first in a series written by attendees at the Gov conference in London in January 2020.

When we think of the Internet, environmental impact isn’t usually top of mind.

If anything, the web is seen as a way to dematerialise traditional products and services, making their physical impact disappear into thin air. However, the hidden side of digital transformation is that the impact does literally go into the air in the form of carbon emissions, and it's more than you might think. The Internet is responsible for approximately 2% of global carbon emissions and it's rising fast.

If the Internet was a country, it would be the sixth most polluting country in the world.

Where do these emissions come from?

Our laptops don't have exhaust pipes and you've probably never seen a chimney belching on the top of a data centre. The emissions of the Internet are out of sight and out of mind, but it all comes from electricity use. And it’s not just in data-centres but in every part of the Internet machine, from transmission towers to repeater stations, to local networks, laptops, smart TVs and phones. The Internet uses a lot of electricity and it's always switched on.

If we are to decarbonise our economy, then we need to decarbonise digital. The public sector has a big role to play both in its “hard” influence through regulation, and its “soft” influence in setting best practises in procurement and internal projects.

I was part of the team that wrote the Sustainable Web Manifesto, a project aiming to raise awareness of sustainability within the digital sector. It sets out six key qualities of sustainable web services. In this post I'll explain what they are and how they relate to public sector projects.

1. Clean

The sustainable web manifesto states that all web services should be powered by clean and renewable energy.

The distributed nature of the Internet means that we cannot control all energy used in accessing our services, but we can decide which data centres we use for our projects. A growing number of data centre providers have commitments to using renewable energy and The Green Web Foundation maintains a comprehensive database of those providers. It should be a standard requirement in public sector digital projects that all hosting providers have a documented commitment to use renewable energy, with extra weight being awarded based on the strength of those commitments.

2. Efficient

Energy efficiency is at the heart of sustainability. From a hosting point of view, the energy efficiency rating, known as power usage effectiveness (PUE), should be a consideration in public sector procurement.

The biggest efficiency gains, however, can often be made in the software itself by minimising the amount of processing required and keeping file sizes small. The apparent abundance of super fast Internet and cheap processing has led to a culture in which web applications are highly inefficient. Because web pages load faster than ever before, many programmers write sloppy code that takes more processing power than it needs to, thereby using more energy.

Improving efficiency doesn't just benefit the environment, it also makes web services perform better for users who have slower connections and don't have the latest devices. It also saves money for users who don't have unlimited data plans. This is particularly important in public sector projects where access to information and services should be ensured for the least privileged in society.

3. Open

In order to rapidly transition to a sustainable web, we cannot work in silos.

Best practises must be shared and teams must collaborate for mutual benefit, sharing technology, skills and knowledge. The public sector already has a great track record of sharing best practises for web projects and digital sustainability should become a key area of focus.

4. Honest

In the quest to create a net-zero carbon web, what matters is not image, but reality. Public sector projects should be transparent about their sustainability goals and metrics, talking openly about both success and failure.

We don’t need to ask permission and it doesn’t need to cost us more, plus it can tangibly improve digital services in other criteria such as accessibility and reliability

In particular, care must be taken to separate the objectivity of public sector work from the pressure to participate in political spin. Greenwash may create good publicity in the short term, but it's detrimental to real progress in the long term.

5. Regenerative

Simply becoming net zero may no longer be enough. We need to look towards negative emissions and ecosystem regeneration. It might seem abstract in terms of digital projects, but digital teams must start thinking about how they will contribute to our ecosystems, and not just extract resources from them.

This will require creative thinking, collaboration with departments working on nature related projects and consideration of regenerative solutions from vendors in the procurement of digital products and services.

6. Resilient

Climate change is already with us and already impacting the web during extreme events like storms, wildfires and floods.

It's in these extreme circumstances when access to public information is most critical. We must therefore design our infrastructure to ensure that it has the best chance of functioning in a disaster and ensuring that services can be accessed on the slowest and most unstable connections. These are technical challenges that need to be faced proactively so that we're prepared with resilient solutions before problems occur.

Towards a sustainable public web

The public sector has a huge opportunity and responsibility to deliver sustainable web services and to drive the wider digital sector towards better practises.

Any digital team can already start to incorporate sustainability considerations in their work immediately using tools such as Website Carbon and The Green Web Foundation database. We don’t need to ask permission and it doesn’t need to cost us more, plus it can tangibly improve digital services in other criteria such as accessibility and reliability.

To have the biggest impact though, the government should set standards of best practise in digital sustainability, build open tools to help measure and improve sustainability, and legislate to enforce at least some key sustainability criteria in all public sector digital projects. By doing so, it will accelerate progress in the industry as a whole and stimulate innovation. — Tom Greenwood

(Picture credit: Death to the stock photo)