Digital is not weightless: Reflections from the Government Digital Sustainability Alliance (GDSA) summit
Personal reflections of the Government Digital Sustainability Alliance (GDSA) Summit - 25 February 2026
Digital carries a dangerous illusion. We talk about “the cloud”, frictionless services, instant AI, seamless transformation. The language implies immateriality. But the Government Digital Sustainability Alliance summit made one thing unmistakably clear to me: digital has weight.
It has carbon.
It has water use.
It has supply chains.
It has social consequences.
And it sits squarely inside the climate and nature crisis.
The 4% that is already outdated
The summit opened with a familiar statistic: ICT accounts for roughly 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. That estimate originates from lifecycle analyses by researchers such as Malmodin and Lundén and was widely cited around 2018–2019, including by The Shift Project. Later in the day, Mike Berners-Lee presented a breakdown from that period showing:
User devices ~37 per cent
Televisions and consumer electronics ~34 per cent
Networks ~14 per cent
Data centres ~10 per cent
Cryptocurrencies ~5 per cent
Two things matter here:
This was a pre-AI estimate. It largely excluded the explosion of generative AI, and much of IoT. In other words, the baseline is already dated.
The dominant impact is not simply hyperscale data centres. It is billions of manufactured devices. Peer-reviewed work by Belkhir and Elmeligi demonstrates that for many digital products, the majority of emissions occur during manufacturing rather than use.
Digital is not clean. It is embodied.
Circularity is structural, not cosmetic
The Minister for Nature and Circular Economy referenced replacing devices based on performance rather than arbitrary time cycles.
It sounds operational. It is systemic.
Circular economy research from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation shows that extending product life materially reduces embodied carbon and raw material extraction. Servers and digital hardware contain more than twenty critical raw materials, many with low recycling rates according to European Commission data.
If manufacturing dominates impact, extending lifespan is one of the most powerful levers available. Design decisions lock in emissions long before reporting frameworks ever see them.
Are we digitising demand or just digitising?
One tension that surfaced repeatedly was uncomfortable but necessary. Government sometimes digitises services or processes without asking a more fundamental question. Should this service exist in this way at all?
And more fundamentally:
Does it have real users?
Is there genuine demand?
Or are we digitising because digitisation itself is assumed to be progress?
Digital government scholarship has warned for years about “paving the cow paths”, i.e. automating inefficient systems rather than redesigning them. Scaling a weak service digitally does not create value, it scales waste.
With the Carbon Budget and Growth Delivery Plan now formalised, digital can no longer be neutral to delivery. If a service has low uptake, unclear demand or marginal value, digitising it faster does not make it sustainable.
This was not explicitly framed this way by every speaker, but it was my clear takeaway from the discussions.
AI: between productivity and paradox
AI was a theme almost through every panel. There were examples of structured governance. Defra’s 25 internal questions before deploying AI. DWP’s experimentation with sustainable prompting, consciously reducing token use and computational demand.
Research supports this caution. Studies by Patterson et al. and Luccioni et al. show that training and inference energy demand can vary dramatically by model scale and architecture, larger models consume substantially more energy.
Mike Berners-Lee then introduced a slide that, crystallised the risk. Four potential trajectories for ICT. One quadrant was circled: Efficiency gains leading to rising overall impact.
This is Jevons paradox, first described in 1865. When efficiency improves, cost falls. When cost falls, usage increases. Overall consumption rises. Berners-Lee argued that, as a society, we have defaulted to that route.
We have defaulted to Jevons paradox.
The better route, the one he implicitly advocated is absolute reduction through sufficiency and constraint. Efficiency combined with limits. Efficiency combined with demand management. Efficiency combined with systemic restraint.
In other words: using ICT to reduce total energy and material throughput, not simply to expand digital activity more cheaply.
At present, we are not on that route.
Beyond carbon
One of the strongest sessions of the day challenged the reduction of sustainability to carbon alone. Carbon accounting is essential, but it is incomplete.
The planetary boundaries framework developed by Rockström and colleagues identifies nine Earth system processes, several of which are already beyond safe limits. Freshwater depletion, biodiversity loss and chemical pollution are not captured by CO₂ metrics.
Lifecycle assessment standards exist precisely because upstream mining and downstream disposal matter. Servers require rare materials. Data centres consume water. E-waste is one of the fastest-growing waste streams globally.
Reducing sustainability to carbon simplifies measurement. But it does not reflect planetary reality.
Social value and material reality
Around 1.6 million people in the UK remain completely offline, according to Good Things Foundation and Ofcom. Digital exclusion is not a marginal issue, it is structural. Citizens Advice research shows that households without reliable digital access often pay more for utilities, insurance and financial services because they cannot access online tariffs or comparison markets.
At the same time, millions of usable devices sit dormant in homes and corporate estates. Refurbishment charities demonstrate a simple but powerful truth: circular economy and social value are not competing agendas. Extending device life can reduce embodied carbon while narrowing the digital divide.
Yet the material reality remains uncomfortable. A smartphone’s components may travel tens of thousands of miles before assembly. Downstream, waste and recycling sectors account for a disproportionate share of modern slavery prosecutions. Digital infrastructure carries social risk at both ends of its lifecycle.
Embedding social value into procurement from the outset, as required under the UK Social Value Model is not compliance theatre. It is one of the few structural levers government holds to influence supply chains, reduce inequality and shape environmental outcomes simultaneously.
Thirty COP conferences later
Berners-Lee displayed a slide tracing 30 COP conferences.
Decades of negotiation. Emissions still rising. Political economy research has documented fossil fuel lobbying’s influence on climate negotiations. The gap between ambition and delivery remains wide.
He framed the climate and nature crisis as a national security issue. Increasingly, defence institutions agree. The ICT footprint slide, highlighting approximately 2 billion tonnes CO₂e in 2020 was a reminder that digital is already material at planetary scale.
And that was before AI scaled.
Secure by design. Green by design.
A resilience session focused on oversized estates, blanket disaster recovery requirements and legacy systems embedded within critical infrastructure.
“Secure by design” is well understood in cyber security. There was a proposal to mirror it with green by design. This could involve:
Embedding environmental thinking at architecture stage.
Including climate risk in risk registers.
Mapping dependencies across regulators and infrastructure.
The Credo project was referenced as an example of attempting to understand systemic digital dependencies across government.
My overall reflection
The summit did not introduce radically new science.
The evidence has existed for decades:
Jevons paradox
Rebound effect literature
Planetary boundaries
Lifecycle assessment standards
Circular economy research
Digital exclusion data
What felt different was alignment. Public sector digital leaders are beginning to speak explicitly in the language of limits, lifecycle and systems.
The illusion of digital weightlessness is fading. The real question is not whether digital can become more efficient. It is whether we are willing to combine efficiency with sufficiency.
Because without constraint, efficiency expands impact. And right now, if Berners-Lee is correct and the evidence suggests he may be, we have defaulted to the wrong quadrant. The opportunity is still there, but only if we choose a different route.