The internet as an industry is responsible for 3.7% of global carbon emissions, exceeding the emissions associated with air travel. This has led to the creation of a new tool that demonstrates how our online actions can negatively impact the environment.
Experts from the University of Exeter, supported by Madeby.studio, have developed the Digital Impact for Species app. It can analyze any website and reveal its hidden ecological costs that go beyond traditional metrics such as CO2 emissions, water, and energy consumption.
“When we visit web pages, we rarely think about the impact it has on nature,” says Dr. Marcos Oliveira Jr., project leader from the University of Exeter team.
“However, the stakes are high: this concerns both the energy spent on transmitting data from data centers to your device and the water used for cooling servers.”
Are websites killing the planet?
To assess the impact of any website, simply enter its URL into a special field in the calculator. The tool provides a rating from A+ to F and shows the degree of ecological impact.
For example, YouTube.com, which processes billions of requests per month, has a rating of C, indicating room for improvement in its ecological footprint. Each page view on this site contributes 0.249 g of CO2, uses 0.0011 liters of water, and consumes 0.62 Wh of energy.
Every 9,000 visits require 10 liters of water — enough to sustain a capuchin monkey for 77 days. At the same time, a tree in the Amazon rainforest would need 41 days to absorb the released amount of CO2.
Additionally, 9,000 visits consume 6 kWh of energy, equivalent to the daily consumption of 1,000 Anna's hummingbirds over 332 days.
“Our goal is not to condemn websites with a high ecological footprint, but to engage people and start a discussion on how we can create a more sustainable internet environment,” adds Dr. Oliveira Jr.
How is a website's ecological footprint calculated?
The assessment uses data from Google PageSpeed Insights, which allows for determining the total volume of all resources loaded when opening a page. If PageSpeed is unavailable, the average weight of pages in the given field is applied.
This includes all files loaded when visiting the page, including images, text, and video. The larger the page size, the more energy is required for data transmission and processing, leading to higher emissions.
The tool then uses information from the Green Web Foundation to determine whether the website is hosted on servers using renewable energy or fossil fuels.
According to the Sustainable Web Design model, CO2 emissions, energy, and water consumption per page view are calculated.
This data is transformed into “visual comparisons with nature,” using a species database based on scientific research.
How to reduce a website's ecological footprint?
Users can significantly reduce their footprint by minimizing the number of search queries and shifting responsibility to website owners and hosting companies.
Researchers recommend reducing the number of images, limiting font usage, simplifying navigation, and avoiding video when possible as quick ways to lower the internet's ecological impact.
It’s also worth considering “green” hosting that uses renewable energy sources, as well as optimizing code and following SEO guidelines to speed up page loading.
