Shulou(Shulou.com)05/31 Report--

Experts say digital technology companies can change their design methods to reduce the carbon footprint of services such as management excellence. Human-computer interaction researchers at Bristow University studied the electricity used to provide YouTube video to people around the world in 2016 so that they could estimate the carbon footprint of the service that year.

Their analysis shows that it is about 10 million tons of CO2 E (10, 000 tons of CO2 equivalent)-- about the size of a city like Glasgow. These carbon emissions are due to servers and network devices transmitting about 1 billion hours of YouTube video to user devices every day.

They also assessed the reduction that could be achieved by eliminating "digital waste"-avoiding sending images to users who only use YouTube to listen to audio. They estimate that this design intervention could reduce the carbon footprint of 10-500000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or about 30, 000 pounds a year.

Although previous academic research has identified ways in which interaction design can reduce the carbon footprint of digital services, this is the first time to quantify the benefits of such intervention.

Chris Plester, professor of sustainability and computer systems at Bristow School of Engineering and lead researcher, said: "Digital services are part of our daily lives.

"but they need a lot of energy to provide-- not only in data centers, but also in networks, mobile networks and terminals, so they can have a huge carbon footprint as a whole."

As people pay more and more attention to corporate greenhouse gas reduction strategies, Professor Preist and his team believe that Sustainable interaction Design (SID) has more potential for carbon reduction than the company is currently exploring.

In this study, the modeling toolkit developed by the researchers is used to assess the carbon footprint of such services and to estimate possible changes in alternative design decisions.

The toolkit allows researchers to build a digital service model that combines data from user behavior patterns with information about how services use the Internet. This will then access the power consumption data of devices on the Internet to allow a statistical model of total service energy consumption, which can be used to estimate its carbon footprint.

The researchers also show that the current standards used by companies to report carbon emissions do not fully explain the overall footprint of these digital services and believe that these standards should be expanded. These standards include emissions related to physical delivery (for example, through trucks), but not those related to the provision of digital services over the Internet and mobile networks.

Professor Preist added: "people are aware of the large-scale energy use of data centers, and companies are increasingly aware of the need to change their practices in response to the challenges that climate change poses to humans and the global ecosystem.

But for streaming services like YouTube, most of the effort is spent on the Internet, especially on the mobile network.

"given the overall size of the carbon footprint of such services, it is important for companies to evaluate and report on these services. by doing so, they can determine the carbon savings that alternative design decisions can save and hope to find ways to reduce the overall footprint."

This technology can also be used to explore the changes in the future service footprint as customer demand increases, and to explore alternative design decisions to deal with this problem.

"We are currently working together to understand that the distribution footprint will change over the next decade as more and more people use the Internet instead of traditional radio and television," explained Dr. Dan Schien, lead designer of the toolkit.

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