Ict Role in Environmental Sustainability

So, by now, after understanding what Green ICT means, you should be asking yourselves how does it works? I mean, how can we use ICT to improve environmental sustainability.

So first of all, i want to introduce you a new word: DECOUPLING. Next video will explain you a little bit more about this new friend of us.

As you have seen in the video, decoupling means reducing the amount of resources and impacts that we use and generate while producing something. If we apply this term to ICT, what can be done to help environment?

Well, there are two principal approaches about how can ICT work for environmental care:

• GREEN IN ICT: that means making devices and technologies (hardware and software) cleaner, less intensive in the use of raw materials, energy and water, and of course, less poluting during their whole life cycle. Using less to produce ICT and polluting less while producing, using and disposing are the core concepts here. Recycling a computer when it doesn't work anymore, will reduce the amount of pollution that this pc generates, and the extraction of some materials in it for its use in another device reduce resource extraction. 

• GREEN BY ICT: that means create oportunities throgh ICT for other products in order to making them more sustainables. New softwares, mesure devices, monitorisation, data analysis...are just a few posibilities. Think about emails: by using this technologie less paper is used to print. So, by the use of ICT we reduce the amount of raw material that another precess uses. Monitoring electric networks and demand energy systems allow us to know how much we need to produce at a time and reduce energy and resource waste.