Got 5 minutes? Grab a cuppa and we’ll give you the need-to-know on an important topic in sustainability. Today, that is your digital emissions footprint with Adam Newman, Co-Founder of Root & Branch Digital.
Just last week, LinkedIn published its Green Skills report, which identified that the sector with the fastest growth in green skills is the tech sector. The reason? The reason? The AI boom is driving unprecedented growth in data centres, bringing with it a huge energy and environmental cost. If coders and developers can alter the code they are making to reduce its energy use, that makes commercial sense as much as it makes sense for the planet.
A few years ago, Adam and his business partner Ollie started digging into the environmental impact of software and quickly realised there was a huge blind spot. Today, Root & Branch helps organisations understand and reduce the carbon footprint of their websites and digital infrastructure through low-carbon hosting and built-in emissions measurement.
Here’s what Adam had to say.
Hannah: Set the scene for us Adam, why should businesses care about digital emissions?
Adam: Every organisation relies on technology, which means every organisation has a role to play.
The challenge is that digital emissions can feel incredibly abstract. If you look at the scale of the numbers involved globally, it’s easy to think, “Well, what am I supposed to do about that?”
That’s actually one of the reasons we started Root & Branch. We wanted to bring the conversation down to an organisational level. The question is: how do you understand your impact and what practical decisions can you make to reduce it?
For me, digital sustainability isn’t about making organisations feel guilty. It’s about giving them visibility and helping them make better decisions.
Hannah: Penny drop moment?
Adam: The reason we started looking at this was because my co-founder Ollie asked me a simple question: had I ever thought about the carbon emissions of the code we write?
At first, I didn’t really understand what he meant. We’d both been developing software for years and it had genuinely never occurred to me.
The penny-drop moment was realising that every line of code has an energy cost attached to it. You write some code, deploy it and then it sits there running every day on physical infrastructure somewhere. Every website, every app, every digital service relies on servers and data centres consuming electricity.
As developers, we think a lot about performance, security and usability. We don’t often think about the environmental impact of the software itself Once I understood that, it became impossible to ignore. Then we started digging into the data and the scale of the challenge became really clear.
Hannah: Key insight
Adam: The statistic that really sticks with me comes from the International Energy Agency.
In 2024 they projected that global data centre electricity demand would double by 2030.
When you first hear that, it sounds significant but maybe not shocking. But then you put it into context. We’ve spent roughly 80 years building the digital infrastructure we had in 2024. The idea that we’ll double the electricity demand associated with that infrastructure in just six years is pretty alarming.
What’s driving a lot of that growth is AI. We’re seeing huge investments in new data centres and computing infrastructure, and whilst the exact numbers are still emerging, the direction of travel is pretty clear.
Another thing that surprises people is the scale of the issue. Back when we first started researching this, digital technologies were already estimated to account for around 4% of global emissions. At the time, that was greater than aviation, shipping and rail combined.
Hannah: Quick wins?
Adam: There are some quick wins to reduce your environmental footprint.
- Think about sustainability earlier in the design process. A lot of sustainability decisions get locked in through brand guidelines, templates and design systems before a website is ever built. By the time a website reaches a developer, a lot of the trajectory has already been set. The earlier sustainability is considered, the more impact it can have.
- Check where your website is hosted. Many organisations don’t realise they may have options when it comes to hosting regions. If your provider offers multiple locations, it can sometimes be as simple as moving to a lower-carbon region powered by cleaner electricity. In some cases it’s a very straightforward change that can significantly reduce emissions without affecting users at all. Better still, pick a low-carbon hosting platform (but I would say that wouldn’t I!).
- Optimise web pages and user journeys: This is probably the easiest win available to most organisations and the bonus is that these changes often improve website performance as well.
- Compress images before uploading them
- Use modern formats like WebP
- Avoid uploading assets that are larger than they need to be
- Review whether every video or animation is actually necessary
Hannah: Name droppers?
Adam: There are three organisations I’d point people towards:
- Green Web Foundation – They’re doing brilliant work helping organisations understand and reduce the environmental impact of the web.
- W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines – These are helping establish best practice for sustainable websites, much like accessibility guidelines did for web accessibility.
- Green Software Foundation – This is focused on reducing the environmental impact of software more broadly. I’m involved with one of the working groups there, and it’s a great place to understand where the industry is heading.
Hannah: Final thought?
Adam: The biggest challenge isn’t that organisations don’t care. It’s that most people simply can’t see their digital emissions.
Once you can measure something, you can start making better decisions about it. That’s really what this space is about: turning an invisible problem into something people can understand, measure and improve.
