Elements of sustainable ICT

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has had a great positive effect in many sectors to help lower our carbon emissions and enable an environmentally sustainable future – a climate-positive handprint. However, at the same time ICT consumes energy at an increasing pace and billions of new devices are manufactured every year. These consume significant amounts of raw materials and also need energy for the production, creating a climate-negative footprint.

The goals of this course is to open up the wider area of ICT, from digital services, to data centres and networks, manufacturing, raw material, energy usage, software and services, and discuss how ICT uses natural resources and energy, and what can be done to make our ICT sector and digital services more environmentally sustainable.

Course contents

• Overview of our ICT ecosystem
• Energy consumption of our ICT infrastructure and how energy is produced
• Materials involved in manufacturing ICT equipment and the recycling involved 
• How software is written and the role of sustainability in the sector 
• How digital services use data and the implications going forward 
• Assessing digital services and their sustainability 

Learning outcomes 

After the course you are able to

• understand what creates our whole ICT environment 
• understand how energy is used in ICT and emissions from different energy sources 
• the manufacturing of ICT equipment, the materials and recycling involved 
• understand software engineering from a sustainability angle 
• evaluate different digital services and their environmental impact 
• assess and measure digital services and e.g. their data usage 
• identify potential places for optimising a digital service and make it more sustainable

Course material

Lecture slides, public research papers and technical reports.

Teaching schedule

Lectures on Tuesdays at 16-18

Completion methods

Lectures and their attendance, reading material, multiple choice questions on the material.