The world is suffering from water shortages and water scarcity, which should be making most of us really concerned, because even if we live in a region that does not currently have water shortages, it will within the next decade or so.
What has internet usage got to do with water usage, you ask… Plenty!
According to recent research conducted at The Imperial College, water usage and internet usage have a lot to do with each other. Water is used in the production of vast amounts of electricity required to keep data centres operational as well as in the vital process of keeping the centres cool.
When one takes into account that the average western European smartphone user uses around 1.9GB of data per month per person according to a report by Ericsson, this receiving and exchanging of data with a data centre somewhere or other means that the server is using power and producing heat.
Bora Ristic, one of the Imperial College researchers, said that the research highlighted the fact that the water footprint of data centres has been sorely under researched.
Tech expert Bill Thompson says that the only way to change this is to change the behaviour of the people running the data centres as it is unlikely that consumer behaviour will change:
“I can’t see myself not streaming a video just because I’m worried about the water consumption. I can see me choosing a video hosting service that says, ‘we are environmentally aware’,” he said.
Fortunately many companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have already made substantial improvements with respect to their water footprint, but as the demand for data centres continues to grow, so do environmental issues.
Data centres can become green in various ways, including by using renewable power, locating their data centres in environments that naturally lend themselves to the cooling process, establishing underwater data centres, and ensuring that no landfill rubbish is created.
This is a good start, but we need to do more and do it far quicker to ensure that there is sufficient drinking water and water for other uses as well, in the decades and generations to come.
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