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. Some classic examples include virtual meetings and conferencing, remote teaching, more efficient energy production and optimised traffic and logistics. 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.

All industry sectors and the public sector use ICT and digitisation is increasing. This creates a situation where ICT on one hand helps to alleviate many current problems in the larger area of sustainability but then on the other hand ICT has an growing negative footprint and increases our use of energy and natural resources.

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
• understand the manufacturing of ICT equipment, and 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, reading material and multiple choice questions.

More information in the Aalto University study guide.

You can get a digital badge after completing this course.

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