Climate change is killing the planet slowly
Every year we are losing the forest size of NY state
Fast Fashion produces 10% CO2 and 20% wastewater
Plastic continues to pollute - 8 Million tons enter the ocean every year
Transportation contributes to 14% of greenhouse emission
Large-scale Agriculture continue to use fossil fuels and synthetic fertilizers
And it goes on... And it took 15 gruelling years for the UN to forge a deal to protect our planet! These are the visible obvious sustainability impacts!
But there is an invisible Digital sustainability impact because we cannot see the digital transformation until it's too late!
A modern smartphone is exponentially more powerful than the guidance computer NASA used for the famous Apollo 11 mission. 100k X times faster! And today,
We have built a digital economy that is burning the planet silently.
Bitcoin Mining alone uses more energy than the entire of Argentina!
The cost of running AI ChatGPT is $3M a month.
Social Media - Cristiano Ronaldo who has 560M followers when publishes a photo on Instagram - The Instagram app consumes energy worth 22 Uk households for a year!
Large Data Centres & Cloud contribute to 3.7% of global Carbon Emission ( Greenpeace Report 2021)
So what does this mean? The underlying tech we have built today has not factored into sustainability - It's centred around Money and Convenience!
What's causing all of this? Exclusivity culture is killing the planet - without crying over the split milk we need a forward-thinking proactive strategy.
The THREE KEY ACTIONS or CHANGES we need today are:
ReDefine, Measure and minimise unsustainability - FIX at the source
ReDesign to manage existing damage with accountability - Damage Control
ReCulture A New Responsible Consumption Mindset! - Culture Change
We often see manufacturers such as Apple constantly adding changes to the sizes, and cameras' megapixels and outdating the phone every couple of years.
My opinion about the 2mm change in the thickness or 1-megapixel depth in the camera is that the planet doesn’t care and neither can people notice the difference!
When we disrupt a working ecosystem, we are generating waste! Wasting PRODUCTIVITY i.e. people's time invested in learning or getting used to the product, and of course, wasting money on outdating a functional system! Emitting CO2 and creating a hole in your pocket and making someone richer! The pace of product development has a great mismatch with the pace of product adoption by the public.
Since 2010, the volume of e-waste generated globally has been steadily rising. By 2019, approximately 53.6 million metric tons of electronic waste was produced worldwide
We need preventive measures to create seamless and sustainable innovations for the existing ecosystems. To do so, we need to consider the following factors of disruptive change:
Speed – how quickly products are innovated and launched
Scale – how many people were impacted by the change
Skills - How can we support upskilling and maintaining jobs
System – How can we honour the existing institutions, organisations, processes, and industries based on the innovation
Society- How do we respect the dependency of society, and families' livelihood and retain diversity?
Sentiment – A lifestyle change, and its impact on well-being and emotions (Stress, anxiety, Fomo), the political and social sentiment impact
Sustainability – It's the end-to-end wastage and climate impact, not just the superficial carbon emissions
We have to think now about how innovations should be designed to adapt to people and the ecosystem around its users instead of disrupting them.
The displacement of jobs from doctors or Engineers could be done by robotic precision! This Disrupts the science schools, colleges, universities, textbooks, authors and lecturers, exam boards and certification processes which are building doctors and engineers of tomorrow!
Displacement and replacement like this - can cause a profound chain reaction! Read more: https://publicintelligence.org/principles/principle-3-disruption-prevention/
You heard of make fast and disrupt fast! We need a paradigm shift in mindset- Manage fast and fix fast! This is called Accountable Redesign!
For those who are interested in our full documentary film about ethical and sustainable digital innovation published in 2021 - check out below.
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