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“Trying to educate your users about the importance of them reducing their carbon footprint is every bit as important about actually reducing our own carbon footprint.”
Attended by more than 400 delegates from 43 countries, the FIPP World Media Congress in the Portuguese town of Cascais kicked off with a look at the innovation that’s happening in the face of severe disruption.
Congress 2023 brought together people from a cross-section of media and technology sectors, who explored key industry topics with the foremost global experts.
John Barnes, Chief Digital Officer at William Reed, talks about sustainability in digital publishing — optimising our digital operations for making a positive, green impact.
Here are a few key insights from the session:
1. Communications industry using up to 20% of the world’s electricity by 2025
4% of the global internet, US global internet usage, makes up 4% of CO2 emissions. Quite shocking. The communications industry could be using up to 20% of the world’s electricity by 2025.
We’re starting to understand that there’s a shift away from what used to be considered to be the big issue, which was the transfer of data and images, much more now onto the computation and storage of those facilities.
More and more data being mined off people in real-time, the fact that people are streaming more and more videos, that people are working from home, and we’re having to put more sort of backend applications into our websites. This footprint is changing all the time.
2. “A shift from face-to-face events into digital”
Whilst I’m supporting our efforts to reduce carbon and to become neutral at some point in the future, in doing so, and in helping my colleagues, I’m likely to see a shift from face-to-face events into digital.
As people start saying, well, let’s do 360-degree events, a couple of online events throughout the year, and one big event, like this, in Lisbon once a year. Let’s actually try and put more of the paper and stuff online so people can download it. Let’s video everything so it’s easier for people to attend. Let’s have virtual attendees.
We’re seeing in this sort of move to sort of measure carbon that one area of the business could actually create problems for another area of the business. And that’s why it’s really important to try and sit as a whole.
3. Educate users about the importance of reducing carbon footprint
Trying to educate your users about the importance of them reducing their carbon footprint is every bit as important about actually reducing our own carbon footprint. And it’s simple things, like people print webpages, they’re useful to print.
So the dilemma for a publisher is, should we have a little button that says “print”? Should we not have the button so people don’t think to print it? In which case they might print through the browser and then they might use four or five pages that are unformatted.
So the education part is sort of everywhere with users, and people on the team. I’ve mentioned editors and I’ve talked about the way that heavy images or badly designed pages can actually get in the way.
You can watch the entire session here:
