Summary

We are hiring! Open positions for postdoctoral researcher and a fully-funded PhD stipend available! Contact daniel.schien@bristol.ac.uk.

We identify the underlying drivers of environmental impact of digital media and how to influence them.

Current approaches to reducing the carbon footprint from computer hardware and software tend to take a static view of media technology based on stocks of devices or modelling efficiency of classes of devices (e.g. network efficiency).

This perspective prioritises control over influence. For example, this view focuses on the near-term effects from more efficient software and hardware.

When complementing the short-term direct control with a view on the longer-term effects, then strategies to reduce the sector’s footprint become more effective; for example, understanding the role of changing patterns of media consumption, the effects of greening of electricity supply or the potential from capping carbon footprints for devices and software.

This project aims to create the missing causal understanding and investigate a framework for anticipating the systemic, long-term environmental impact from changes to the design, provision, and use of digital media services and provide a step-improvement to our ability to pursue Net-Zero goals. Our project team represents the entire vertical stack of technologies that form the ICT product system, from user-facing digital services to network and datacentre operators. We have the experience and capacity to investigate ways to reason about and assess the longer-term carbon impact from decisions taken by users, software providers, and infrastructure operators