 I'm here today to talk about digital footprints. I usually start with this slide, the definition of sustainability, because I normally don't talk to people a lot that understand what sustainability actually means. I talk a lot to industry people. I talk a lot to software engineers. And it's always helpful to remind people that sustainability is not about just green or environmental sustainability. It's a balance of three things. And today, in most of these things, we don't actually have a way to measure it. I'm going to talk about the environmental aspect today, because we don't have a way to really measure the social impact of the digital world. Now, aside from sustainability, the other really important word, of course, hello, the other really important thing. And I hope I don't have to explain this to you. I feel like you all should know when you're at this conference is the word sustainability development, because that's really what it's about right now is to figure out a way how we can grow our society, how we can evolve as a society in a sustainable way, balancing the needs of today with the needs of tomorrow. And if you have two kids like me, then you have basically direct stakeholders in this process. What does it mean for us at the SDA? We are a non-profit NGO, and we basically have one very simple ambition, is to really figure out the path for sustainable development of the digital world. If I translate that into really simple words, what we're trying to figure out is, how can we digitalize more? How can we have a bigger digital economy that has no negative impact on people, planet, and economics? And I think that's important. I often these days I'm very negative about the digital world, but I think it's at the end, I'm a software engineer. I do believe that digital technology has a role to play, but we really have to make sure we have transparency about the downsides, and we know what we're getting ourselves into when we say things like, let's digitalize the entire society. And then I often get this, especially when I talk to industry people that say, Max, what's the problem? It is already figured out, right? It's perfect. Especially when you have statements like Google, as a non-profit, I get to really point a company, so I enjoy that very much. It's my favorite statement. Carbon neutral since 2007, it blows your mind, right? It's like they knew that there was a problem of carbon before anybody else knew, and back then they already solved it, which I think is incredible. Of course, if you look into the details, you will know that they, of course, lobbied the definition of when they can say this based off the GHG protocol. So the telcos and the tech companies together decided that only energy matters, which is, of course, incredibly silly. If you look at the footprint of these devices and even more so servers and storage systems, then you will know that energy is a problem, that it's definitely there, but decarbonizing the energy system is not the role of tech companies. But if you read these statements, you don't really feel that there is a problem. And that brings us to why you're here, is we need to know what the problem is, right? What is the environmental footprint of the digital world? We don't know. But Lord Kelvin suggests we ought to know. And in order to explain it to you, because it's really difficult, especially when you talk to environmental scientists, I often get this max, there cannot be an environmental footprint of the digital world, because it physically doesn't exist. I'm like, yes, I get that. But I'm still trying to figure it out. So I'm going to take you a little bit on a journey about IT with some mental models that help you think about it and then we can talk about how to measure things, at least in a principled way. And if you stick around a little bit, Anna will come later with a very practical way, Anna Tarara. I'm more the meta guy, even though you can also ask me any technical questions on how to do it. So the journey, the meta guy. So I mean the nerdy word, meta, the abstract guy. Because I think it's important that we have a way to talk about this, right? I think we often get lost in the terminology. Now, when I started building software, it looked like this. There was a software application that I wrote, that I put on a server that I usually installed myself. That server was in a data center. I knew where the data center was, and all of it is connected through fiber networks. Very straightforward, right? Then every two to three years, the IT sector, including me, we introduced another layer of abstraction, which is something we are very good at. So the first one was virtualization. So then you didn't know any more on which physical server you are. It could have been 20, 100s, 50. Then we introduced something that's really hot right now. It's containerization, which is basically to slice the application into even smaller pieces and lose even more connection to the actual physical infrastructure. And then this is the best one of IT, serverless. Why? It's so funny, because it still runs on a server, of course. But you get the idea that we are trying to tell people there is no infrastructure. Don't worry about the infrastructure, but the infrastructure is always there. And then came another layer of abstraction that really made this even more difficult, which is obviously cloud. And it has this misconception that if you are in a cloud environment, you have these availability zones. And there is this misconception that an availability zone equals a data center, but that's actually not the case. So you don't technically know in which data center you might end up in the cloud. You know you are in a specific region, but you don't know where you are. You know literally nothing about the physical infrastructure that your application is running on. And observing all these facts, all these layers of abstraction, and then you go ask this question, what's the environmental impact of the digital realm? Well, I don't even know which server I'm on. I don't even know which server is plugged into which data center. I know nothing. And then you tell me, please measure it. It's very, very, very difficult, which is why, of course, I'm a software engineer. So here you go with a layer of abstraction. Of course, you need a different way to think about it. And this one, for most people from the IT sector, they usually throw beer bottles at me or other objects, because they're like, Max, you can't over-simplify it like this. Yeah, but it makes it a bit easier to think about it and to talk about it with you and others. So to explain this model a bit, there's digital infrastructure. And I'll apply it so that you see how it can be applied in different contexts. There's digital infrastructure, data centers, servers, laptops, fiber that generates digital resources. Don't worry about the definition for now. There is another layer on top of that that allocates these resources. This is what we often refer to as cloud or hosting companies that produce them and then allocate them. And the software application then consumes those resources, those digital resources. And that application provides a product or a service or an experience to a user that is then using that application. Very simple. Now, why is this model very useful? Because you can apply it, for example, to this laptop. You can say the laptop represents digital infrastructure. The operating system on the laptop is a resource provisioning technology, which decides which application, at this point, it's the slides, is getting all the resources. And then you have a software application, which is the slides, in this case, that are consuming those resources. So this works in this context, but it also works in the context of a data center and servers. You have this idea of digital resources that are flowing through the system. Now, if you have this concept of a digital resource, you can do something very powerful. Because you can then assign an environmental footprint to that digital resource. So we're not measuring the environmental footprint of an application, but of the resources that the application consumes. If I know the footprint of all steel bars in this building, I can get relatively close to measuring the footprint of the entire building. And literally, software only consumes these four types of resources. That's it. And a server or a laptop is a converter. It converts electricity and resources into these four digital resource primitives. And that's also what the cloud is built upon. This is what it means to have digital infrastructure that produces resources. And we figured out a way at the SCA, and it's all public. It's all open source, open access. You can just get it on our website. Or we are trying to figure out a way how to basically apply the lifecycle assessment methodology to these resources. Again, difficult because any environmental scientists you ask, they don't like that we're trying to do this. But I think it's useful. Now, with this idea of digital resources on top of this LCA that I can then apply, I can do something else. And that's even, in my opinion, even more powerful than measuring the environmental footprint of an application. I can measure waste. Because the biggest problem in IT is not necessarily that applications consume a lot of resources, but that we have lots of, lots of capacity standing around your laptops, data centers all over the world that are just there to catch peaks. So when everybody goes shopping, then there needs to be a lot of servers to be able to serve all these people. And when these servers are not being used, they're still running. They're still consuming energy. They're still consuming resources. And with this methodology and this way of thinking, you can then not just calculate how much does the application consume, but how much is it wasting on the infrastructure. And that wastage is something we need to address. That is something we can address right now. And, yeah, period. You can do a lot of other interesting things with this model, but it really helps to have this idea of a digital resource flowing through a system because it makes it a lot more easy to communicate about this and the problems in this value creation chain. Good, that was the measuring part. Now, you can measure it. That doesn't make it sustainable. Just because you can measure something, doesn't make it sustainable at all. So there is a second thought model that we use at the STA. And that's very important to me because in the world of IT, in the world of tech, there is no notion of responsibility, like responsibility especially for environmental footprint. There's responsibility for profit, for delivering, for making sure things are available, but there is no responsibility for environmental footprint. And we use this model. We believe that the user has also a certain responsibility. So if you have a device with some software on it and you have functionality in that software you're not using, you should, of course, turn off that functionality. I always use this example if you have an electric car that's charged with 100% green electricity, you still shouldn't drive it in a circle. So you have a responsibility to practice sustainable use. But more importantly, if you manufacture digital products, you have a lot more responsibility. You should use as little digital resources as possible. That's obvious that we have that in other industries as well. But you also, and that is really important, you need to make the user aware of the digital resource consumption and associated environmental impact of their usage. Give you another great car example. If you sit in an electric car these days and you press the gas pedal really hard, you most of the time have a display that immediately says you're draining your battery, you're hurting your battery, the health of the battery is decreasing because of your behavior. You have instantaneous feedback of your behavior to the environmental impact that you might have. And in the digital world, we don't have that. If I upload a petabyte of photos to any provider, pick the one you like, you'll never get feedback saying like, hey, just that you know this petabyte is now going to consume, it's now going to create a footprint of a ton of CO2 a year. You don't get that feedback, right? Never. You have no transparency and no awareness of such a thing. And I'm not saying that that then transfers the responsibility to the user. I'm just saying that that transparency is needed for all of us to have a better understanding of what our behavior is doing to the environment. The other layers also have a responsibility. And I just talked about waste. Waste is something I'm very passionate about because there's a lot of it in the digital space. And I believe that the resource provisioning companies, so cloud hosting companies, have a responsibility to remove waste from their systems. And last but not least, if you're in the digital infrastructure sectors or if you run a data center or you make laptops, you must produce sustainable digital resources. So you must figure out a way how to make a laptop that has no additional environmental impact. And it always sounds extreme, but it's completely possible. You can recycle most of these parts. Chips are not getting faster. We are now exactly at that point where that becomes possible. And then at the SCA, I'm not going to talk a lot about that. Of course, we're nonprofits, so we're trying to figure out all these different instruments that you need to create in order to create markets around these things. We are not very good at it. I'd be very honest with you because we're too nerdy. We're too much in the technical details most of the time. But we're learning and we're trying to figure out how we can enable these responsibilities in our European society, but also on a global scale. Last one. Then I'm done. We can ask some questions. This is more like a personal pletoyer, is the German word, I think. So I always ask this question. So we have this idea of transparency. We have this idea that we know that there is an environmental footprint. And I hear it here a lot about digital sovereignty and all these things. But I really wonder, digital sovereignty is now becoming, especially in Germany, this discussion around giving some competitive advantage to industry and figuring out business models on data. And I'm like, is that really what we want to bring to the internet as Germans and Europeans? Is that our contribution? We haven't contributed in the sense that we created all these big tech companies. That wasn't us. But we can contribute by bringing our values and figuring out how to bring our values into the digital realm. And one of those values should be just sustainability but also transparency. And I think we should not focus so much on this fear, security, privacy. We're going to be attacked. We're not going to have sovereign infrastructure. Oh my god. But rather, focus on how can we shape this global space with our values. That's it. Yeah, I thought if we have 20 minutes and 10 minutes presentation, 10 minutes questions. Sorry? Yeah, of course, yeah, I will. Are there any questions? Let's start here then. In my view, that's the end user. But is it more about the owner of the other? That depends. So the question is, is it about the user or the owner of the application? The challenges that in our modern digital space, you don't ever really own an application anymore, right? You always are in a rental relationship. So that's why I call it a user. But I have to say I generally hate this idea of a user and I haven't figured out a new way because it's a good joke for your friends. What does the digital world and heroin have in common? Both call their customers users, right? And that really tells you a lot about the space. So I agree with you. I don't have a good answer to that. Yeah, thanks a lot. It's pretty interesting. And when you presented the value chain, I mean, you said something about the different responsibilities of all the different stakeholders there. That makes sense. But do you feel like there's one part of the value chain where we can make the biggest win? Good question. So the question is, is there some part in this picture where we can have the biggest impact? And I, to be honest, for a long time, I was working on the bottom layer because I thought it's there. But these people will not do anything if the other two are not asking for it. So I think there's a lot we can do in terms of just basically deciding that we don't want waste and setting thresholds in the provisioning layer. Say, you shall not waste energy, right? And on the layer above, so if software people make software to consider, so to say, the resource consumption as part of a non-functional requirement, same as accessibility. For example, for government websites, it's always to be accessible. It has to be designed in a certain way. It has to be inclusive. But never nobody ever says, and it should minimize the amount of digital resources it uses. So introducing this non-functional requirement could be very powerful, I think, on that layer. But those two green layers, I think, is where the party is at. However, I think the user also plays a role because at the moment, I think a lot of people aren't completely unaware of the relationship between environmental impact and their digital usage. And raising that awareness is equally important because otherwise you don't have political will in that sense, right? Yeah, so the green layers, so you're saying that you should be taken here by the service provider and the developers, right? But what are the incentives for them to actually do so? You know, I want to have my ability, 100% less problems for the users and what's the incentive and should we price into the, like, how do I think should we have a market for that and what kind of approach would you suggest? Yeah, good question. So the question is how do we price in, or what's the incentive for these people to change and should we price in externalities? That's an interesting one. So I'll give you an example. Maybe you all know this to-do list app called Asana. Their monthly operational cost that goes to infrastructure is about 60%. So 60% of all the revenue goes basically back into a cloud provider, in this case, AWS. And that doesn't seem to be a problem to them. And you would argue, same in energy efficiency, that cost should be an incentive enough to minimize resource usage. But in practice from what I've seen and what I've learned, that doesn't work. So I don't have the perfect answer either. I do believe that we can have a good play between labeling digital resources and differentiating them, but also setting thresholds. So if we have this mental model that somebody's producing digital resources, we can say, when you produce a digital resource, it cannot have more environmental impact than this. And then you don't create an incentive for the developer to change, but you just change the infrastructure under them. All right, same as we are changing the energy system right now and none of us have to do anything in that sense about it. It's just being changed for us. All of a sudden we just get green electrons.