A New Calculator Accurately Shows How Much Environmental Damage Internet Searches Cause

According to Euronews, 9,000 search queries on YouTube.com use 10 liters of water, which is enough for a capuchin monkey to survive for 77 days.

The internet accounts for 3.7 percent of global carbon emissions, placing it above the aviation industry. If the internet were a separate country, it would be the fourth largest polluter on the planet.

Therefore, scientists have created a new tool that allows for assessing how internet activity impacts nature.

Climatologists from the University of Exeter, in collaboration with Madeby.studio, developed the Digital Impact for Species tool, which analyzes websites and identifies their ecological consequences beyond traditional metrics of carbon emissions, water usage, and energy consumption.

“We don’t think about the impact on nature when we visit a website,” notes Dr. Marcos Oliveira Jr., the project leader from the University of Exeter.

“However, the consequences are significant: from the energy required to transmit data from a data center to your computer or smartphone, to the water used for cooling servers.”

Does the internet affect ecology?

To find out the impact of any website, simply enter its URL into a special field of the tool. It provides an overall rating from A+ to F and shows how visiting affects the environment.

For example, YouTube.com, which processes billions of queries each month, received a C rating, indicating room for improvement in its ecological sustainability. Each page view on this site results in the emission of 0.249 g of CO2, the use of 0.0011 liters of water, and 0.62 Wh of energy.

Every 9,000 visits per month require 10 liters of water—enough for a capuchin to live for 77 days. With this number of monthly visits, a tree in the Amazon rainforest would need 41 days to absorb the released CO2.

Additionally, 9,000 visits require 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 in discussions about how to make the internet more sustainable,” adds Dr. Oliveira Jr.

How is a website's ecological footprint calculated?

The tool uses Google PageSpeed Insights to measure the total amount of resources loaded when opening a page. If PageSpeed is unavailable, it uses industry averages.

This includes the total size of all files loaded when visiting a webpage, such as images, text, and video. The larger the page size, the more energy is needed to transmit and process data, leading to increased emissions.

The tool then uses data from the Green Web Foundation to determine whether the website is hosted on servers powered by renewable energy or fossil fuels.

According to the Sustainable Web Design model, it calculates CO2 emissions, water consumption, and energy use for each page view.

This data is transformed into “visual comparisons with nature,” relying on a species database based on scientific research.

How can a website's ecological footprint be reduced?

Users can significantly reduce their ecological footprint by minimizing the number of search queries and redirecting responsibility to website owners and hosting services.

Researchers recommend using fewer images, limiting the number of fonts, simplifying navigation, and avoiding videos when possible as effective ways to reduce the ecological impact of the internet.

“Green” hosting, powered by renewable energy, as well as removing unnecessary code and following search engine optimization (SEO) guidelines to speed up user access to necessary pages, are also beneficial. {lang_tg} {lang_share_buttons}