Vesna Manojlovic

A Plea for Climate Justice - Report from the IAB Workshop on e-Impact

Vesna Manojlovic

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Here is an urgent plea from network operators, academic researchers and activists: we must decrease energy consumption and materials usage in Internet operations, governance, and standardisation. This is our only hope if we're to adapt to the current climate crisis and prevent catastrophic consequences.

The IAB (Internet Architecture Board) hosted a workshop on Environmental Impacts of the Internet Applications and Systems in December 2022:

...to discuss the Internet’s environmental impact, discuss the evolving needs from industry, and to identify areas for improvements and future work.
The Internet runs on systems that require energy and raw materials to manufacture and operate. While the environmental benefits of the Internet may certainly outweigh this use of resources in many cases, it is incumbent on the Internet industry to ensure that this use of resources is minimized and optimized.

This fits well within one of the IAB's major roles in long term planning and coordination between different areas of IETF activity.

Over the course of two weeks, in four multi-hour sessions, ~50 participants shared presentations, discussions and pointers to interesting documents — and came up with a better understanding of the complexity of problems, as well as some concrete action points for the near future.

You can find all the video recordings and slides here:

Societal Context

I took part both in my capacity as a Community Builder for the RIPE NCC, and with my personal inclinations to activism and “dreaming big”. My initial paper was urging IAB to be more ambitious than only decreasing environmental impact, but to also consider how can Internet contribute to “Climate Justice”.

I was invited to give a talk as part of the Big Picture presentations, focusing on Societal Aspects. After reading almost all the papers, I took inspiration from works by Fieke, Maya, and Shayna. I incorporated suggestions from Jukka and Wim. And I added my own "big dreams". This resulted in suggestions that were well received by workshop chairs and quoted in the follow-up sessions:

  • 10% yearly decrease of energy & materials consumption for ICT;
  • Focus on actions - not on measurements;
  • Support for adding "Sustainability Considerations" section to each RFC!

Inspiration

Preliminary Conclusions of Day 1 by the Workshop Chair

(Dis)Agreements

With 30 papers and 40 presentations and 50 knowledgable and opinionated people, there was much information to be processed, many discussions and quite a few disagreements.

I have strong objections to the conclusion by Jens Malmodin that the "Internet consumes less energy and emits less carbon than what many think".

This might be because there was no clarity, even between the participants, of what should be considered "the Internet": core? edge? whole ICT?

I also disagree with a focus of this paper on "increasing energy efficiency" , because I believe that the focus should be on decreasing the consumption. While I do find encouraging the existence of a group of technology vendors, service and content providers would be interested in "Greening of Streaming", I find their focus on increasing energy efficiency is misguided, because of "efficacy myth" and Jevons paradox.

Luckily, there were many more papers that I did agree with and learned from:

One of the Reports (disputed by me)

Preliminary Conclusions

At the end of the Session 4 - on Next Steps (slides) - there were some high-level conclusions, and I will select just a few:

  • The workshop clearly believes that there’s a need for Internet technology to both:
    • Help other areas of society in reducing the overall environmental impacts, and
    • Do everything we can to help reduce Internet’s own environmental impact
  • There’s momentum in this topic, and this can be used to make improvements
  • Design for energy constrained situations, and your designs may work also elsewhere

Personal Recommendations

After listening to many detailed technological discussions, I still think that we should focus on how to degrowth the Internet, so that it fits within planetary limits (keeping the energy usage and CO2 emissions below the "Paris Agreement targets" for 1.5 degrees warming), and reversing the overconsumption of materials, water and energy.

For me, the main take-aways from the workshop were:

My personal suggestion is: to challenge existing power structures, through political demands and activism. I will elaborate on these in my follow-up articles and presentations.

Political Demands, illustrated

Next Steps

Here are some small but concrete steps for workshop participants (and Dear Readers) to do:

  • Discussion on the "e-impact" list should continue!
  • Discussion at the IETF-116 IABOPEN session
  • Improvements will progress independently: metrics, implementations, TVR, etc.
  • Maybe something else as well?
    • “Sustainability considerations & tradeoffs” document
    • A new working group ”e-interest group”?
    • (your idea here)

As a Community Builder for RIPE (NCC) community, I am inviting you to bring up these topics in Working Groups: mailing lists & forum:

  • Connect-WG (for operational improvements)
  • MAT-WG (Measurements, Analysis & Tools)
  • Cooperation-WG: for "politically" cited topics
  • Best Current (operational) Practices Task Force
    • ... because, despite my idealism, business decision makers have to be influenced using their language, and there are already improvements that could be embraced by the ISPs and other network operators.

And if you don't like mailing lists, we also have a Discourse-based discussion forum:

forum.ripe.net

Events and Communities

One of the proposed actions & next steps was: for IETF to connect with others working on these topics.This resonates with my suggestion of "solidarity" -- focusing on those who are not usually present in

Here are some communities: activist, hackers and academics: to engage with in the next few months:

Sustainable ICT (image by Eve M. Schooler)
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About the author

Vesna Manojlovic

Vesna Manojlovic is Community Builder at RIPE NCC. Vesna joined the RIPE NCC as a Trainer in 1999. In 2003, she took responsibility for developing and delivering advanced courses, such as RPSL, Routing Registry, DNSSEC and IPv6. In 2008, she lead efforts to establish IPv6 RIPEness as a measure of IPv6 deployment among LIRs. In 2011, she joined the Science Division as Manager of the Measurements Community Building team; in 2015 she moved to Communications Department as Senior Community Builder, with a focus on organising hackathons. Vesna gives presentations at many technical conferences and workshops, and enjoys visiting hackerspaces. Vesna received a Batchelor of Sciences Degree in Computer Science and Informatics from the School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade. She has three children.

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