About
It is encouraging to see more and more studies published about the environmental footprint of the ICT sector. Unfortunately, the outcomes of those studies are often misinterpreted. In fact, one can look at the footprint of a product or activity in many different ways which all make sense but serve different purposes. It is very easy to mistake one purpose for another and thus derive completely wrong conclusions, which may lead to harmful—albeit well-intentioned—decision-making.
I believe we can avoid those misunderstandings by clarifying the different methodological choices and their corresponding purpose. This mental framework helps draw correct conclusions from the growing corpus of sustainability studies. In this presentation, I summarize what I currently see as three of the most important methodological choices. Then, I'll discuss a couple of examples from computer networks (my area of research) to illustrate how easy it is to misinterpret footprint numbers.
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The talk
Credits and licence
- Institution
- CERN
- Speaker
- Romain Jacob
- Year
- 2026
- Language
- English
- Subjects
- Mathematics
- Source
- CERN
- Licence
- CERN, as CERN states it. CERN's terms
- Attribution
- © CERN. CERN provides its audiovisual media free of charge for educational and informational use, credited to CERN; this lecture is shown in CERN's own player.
- Who can watch
- CERN gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Tweens profiles and older, judged from what the source says about it. How courses are placed