Transcript

SCOTT STONHAM: In order to make some of these changes, we really need to nudge these behavioural changes, kind of, incentivise these behavioural changes. And in the digital realm, there are certain things that we can look at and communicate.

And I think the key to making this happen is knowing what to measure and knowing what to communicate. And then once we've measured something and created a baseline, we can reward for improvement against that baseline. But first of all, we need to get that baseline.

So, there's different areas we can look at. A few of them we touched on in the report, as well. An example would be data storage. Data storage is out of sight, out of mind, unless you've got these old-fashioned – oh, I’ve got one over here – hard disks you plug-in, you don't really think about where your data is being stored. And we think, again, digital is carbon-free. It's not. Digital is not carbon-free.

Storing data in the cloud, getting it to the cloud, reading it back from the cloud, has a carbon footprint. In fact, I think it was Stanford University said that storing 100 gigabytes of data would generate about 0.2 tons of carbon emissions a year.

I mean, there's a lot of 100 gig chunks of data just sitting around doing nothing. There's another piece of research. I think, it came from Jisc, actually, that said that 90% of data is generated, and stored, and never used again.

So, there's all this data that's just left around. Now, in terms of the measurement piece, we could start off by measuring how much data do individuals have dotted around by working out how often this data is being accessed and utilised and finding those pieces of data that have been sitting there for ages, and just not done anything with.

And then working out how to communicate to those people. How do they just get rid of it? How do they get rid of it? Make it easy.

As soon as you make anything more than two steps, then people are not going to do it. So, you've just got to make it easy, two or three steps, and it's going to be done. But they've got to know what they're going to do and why they're going to do it.

So that's a measuring, communicating, and incentivising based on data storage. Another one could be sharing huge documents and emails, replying all of these things. The data is there for us to analyse. It's there sitting in our systems.

We just need to figure out what it is and how we communicate that in a way that allows people to make simple changes. The other one could be video calls, as well. Incentivising people to turn the video off for even five minutes of a one-hour call can make a big difference.

And again, that can be tracked through the systems, as well. So, measure, communicate, and reward for the good behaviour. But it requires us being able to set those baselines. And that's what we need to work on first.