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When Good Enough is the Best Option: Use of Digital Sufficiency to Fight Climate Change

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Information Integration and Web Intelligence (iiWAS 2024)

Abstract

The ICT sector has seen many improvements in productivity and efficiency in the past decades. However, its total energy consumed, as well as its carbon emissions, has never decreased. This is mostly due to a systemic phenomenon called the rebound effect: although each process consumes less energy, the global increase in process usage results in an unexpected growth in carbon emissions. In this paper, we present energy-efficient techniques and we argue why it is necessary to combine efficiency with a new approach. This novel approach is digital sufficiency, involving users and developers to reduce the demand in addition to efficiency improvements.

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Acknowledgements

This publication is part of the project PID2020-113037RB-I00, funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. Besides the NEAT-AMBIENCE project, we also thank the support of the Departamento de Ciencia, Universidad y Sociedad del Conocimiento del Gobierno de Aragón (Government of Aragon: Group Reference T64_23R, COSMOS research group).

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Correspondence to Nicolas Tirel .

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Tirel, N., Ilarri, S., Roose, P., Noureddine, A., Le Goaër, O. (2025). When Good Enough is the Best Option: Use of Digital Sufficiency to Fight Climate Change. In: Delir Haghighi, P., Greguš, M., Kotsis, G., Khalil, I. (eds) Information Integration and Web Intelligence. iiWAS 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15342. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78090-5_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78090-5_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-78090-5

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