Data Bites #54 - Digital sustainability, thinking about the energy, water and resource costs of data, digital technology and AI

April’s Data Bites - the fifth at Public Digital, following 49 at the Institute for Government - was themed around the environment and sustainability.

Digital sustainability - including thinking about the energy, water and resource costs of data, digital technology and AI - has been rising up the agenda recently: there was a recent conference on Think Digital Sustainability for Government, while ‘minimise environmental impact’ was added to the UK government design principles the day before Data Bites. And environment data has long been at the vanguard of data in government (for example, Open Defra).

You can watch this session just below (or on YouTube) or listen via SoundCloud.

Ishmael, Lead Sustainability Business Architect at the Department for Work and Pensions, gave an introduction to digital sustainability, outlining the importance of the issue and touching on some government initiatives to do something about it.

Matt, Environmental Informatics Manager at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, spoke about sharing data in hydrological research and beyond.

Here are Matt's slides

Isaac, Partnerships Director at Climate Emergency UK, and Alex, Democracy Programme Lead and Senior Researcher at mySociety, talked about their work on measuring UK local authority climate action through their bi-annual Council Climate Action Scorecards. The next iteration is due out in the next few months, and you can also explore:

• Scorecards case studies

• Scorecards Successes report

• Scorecards section infographics

• Scorecards nation infographics

• mySociety on fragmented data.
  

See Isaac and Alex's slides

Liz, Senior Digital Transformation Manager at the North London Waste Authority, spoke about why tracking waste is hard.