Digital technologies are profoundly influencing all economic sectors and have potential to contribute towards a sustainable society. At the same time, the production, use and waste management of these technologies, which lie at the core of the economic sector of information and communication technology (ICT), are causing environmental impacts. Previous studies have applied life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology and life cycle thinking to assess current and future direct energy use and climate impact of the global ICT sector. These studies frequently arrive at contradictory results regarding future impacts. Calculation approaches applied differ significantly, the consideration of key aspects varies, fast-growing digital technologies are seldom included in future scenarios and uncertainty analyses are typically limited. The aim of this study is to develop guidelines for assessments of the current and future direct energy use and climate impact of the global ICT sector based on LCA methodology and life cycle thinking. The guidelines have been developed based on literature reviews, the authors’ aggregated and broad expertise in this topic and in workshops. Key aspects in influencing the current and future direct energy use and climate impact of the global ICT sector, covering its three subdomains of end-user devices, networks and data centres as well as all life cycle stages, are identified. These include, for example, the number of end-user devices, number of subscriptions and the annual electricity use of networks and data centres. The guidelines address challenges for practitioners and can contribute towards more transparent and coherent future studies.

Backlashes to climate policy have raised the interest in policy packages that can simultaneously reduce emissions effectively, handle distributional effects, and reverse contemporary trends towards increased socio-economic inequalities. In this paper, we use Sweden as an example to study the effect of policy packages with combined climate, social, and macroeconomic goals. While Sweden has historically been considered a climate leader with a strong welfare state, income inequality has grown considerably. In recent years, the country has experienced a roll-back of climate policy, following debates concerning high fuel prices. Among the policy changes are reduced energy taxes on gasoline and diesel. We use the macro-econometric model E3ME, combined with micro-data for different income groups, to compare the effects of the reduced fuel taxes with other policy measures, using a similar fiscal amount. Results show that income support can compensate for high fuel prices more efficiently, while avoiding increased emissions. We further compare the effects of policy packages that combine a raised fuel tax or a progressive tax with recycling schemes. Fuel tax packages with recycling to dividends, green subsidies and public welfare can improve mitigation significantly, compensate for distributional effects, and have beneficial effects on the economy. Using a progressive tax to finance green subsidies and public welfare can combine mitigation with reduced income inequality, enhanced employment and economic growth. In both cases, deficit funding of green investments enhances policy performance.

Information communication and technology (ICT) services and solutions can improve resource efficiency in a variety of sector, but also result in direct environmental impacts. This study assesses the direct environmental impacts of an ICT service that improves vehicle fuel efficiency using a cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment (LCA). This is one of the first studies to examine the entire life cycle of an ICT service from development to use and maintenance, with a focus on software—an aspect that is typically neglected in previous studies. The results suggest that software development and maintenance and the use of in-vehicle communicators for data transmission have the largest environmental impacts across multiple categories. Deployed across a fleet of 150,000 vehicles over 5 years, we estimate that the ICT service is responsible for 174 tCO2e. However, this is negligible compared with the total emissions of the fleet and the potential savings from the service, given a single diesel vehicle in this fleet emits around 130 tCO2e over the same period. We explore several scenarios to reduce the footprint of the ICT service. The largest potential reduction of around one-third is achieved by replacing in-house servers with cloud computing in a data center located in a region with low-carbon electricity. The study demonstrates how LCA can be used to assess the environmental impacts of ICT services and the importance of considering software in these assessments.

Digital solutions based on information and communication technologies (ICT) provide many opportunities in buildings to achieve resource and energy efficiency. In general, these solutions enable either monitoring or advanced control of buildings. The ICT solutions' overall impacts on the environment are often presumed positive without a holistic approach based on life cycle thinking. The research on energy and indoor monitoring systems usually focuses on system performance and potential benefits rather than the entire system and it thus misses the life cycle impacts of the system itself. To address this limitation, the aims of this study are to assess life cycle environmental and resource impacts of a building monitoring system (BMS) and to identify hotspots in this system. The case study of KTH Living Lab represents an extensive BMS. It was applied and assessed using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. The results show that wires, sensors and data acquisition equipment constitute hotspots for all the environmental and resource impacts assessed in this study. Thus, the impacts of these devices are important to consider by, e.g, building managers.