When COP 26 comes to Glasgow in just over a month, world leaders will discuss the practical steps needed to slow climate change and protect the environment.

The last few years have seen many of scientists’ worst predictions come true – soaring temperatures, wildfires, and flooding, to name a few.

As such, citizens, governments, and companies are looking to contribute to protecting the environment.

However, too often, the weight of stopping climate change is placed on the shoulders of individual consumers. We are told to monitor our carbon footprint, make eco-friendly choices, reduce, reuse, and recycle.

But the influence individuals have on the environment is small compared to some of the largest companies and industries.

After all, the biggest contributors to climate change are heat and electricity production, agriculture, and industry. Together, they contribute around 70% of greenhouse gas emissions.

But at the same time, these industries work to meet the demands of their customers. Companies can claim that they are simply responding to market forces and expect individuals to change their habits to drive demand.

Ultimately, neither side can bear the responsibilities alone. There needs to be greater cooperation between all sides.

For CodeClan CEO Melinda Matthews Clarkson, digital technology is an essential part of this cooperation. It allows for the gathering and transmission of information, helping consumers make the informed decisions needed to fight climate change.

Keep it Clear

“There’s a level of confusion over what an individual can do to make the biggest impact,” she says.

To beat confusion, we need clarity. If companies are more transparent with their data, people can make informed decisions.

For example, calculating a carbon footprint is tricky because our supply chains are so complicated. Calculating the emissions of running a fridge is relatively simple, but how do you calculate the cost of building it, shipping it, and disposing it, all balanced against its lifespan?

Working this out relies on data that is spread out and siloed across the supply chain.

But if the data were collected and made available to people, we can better understand how our decisions affect the environment. We can know what goes into the products we buy, where they came from and where they go when they are disposed of.

This makes it harder to for companies to shirk responsibilities, hiding emissions in the supply chain, greenwashing their operations, or relying on dubious offsetting programmes.

“It all goes back to consumers carrying the burden, with corporations giving us products we don’t know what to do with. And I think technology can help change that,” Matthews Clarkson adds.

Smart Business

Digital technology provides a means to communicate this data. For example, QR codes can provide large amounts of information without the need for printed plastic packaging. It can reveal where goods were produced, where the components are produced and from what, how long shipping took – it could even track which vessel it was transported on.

Digital technology also makes it easier for companies to gather this data. There are numerous commercially available platforms on the market, helping save development cost and time. Not only can this information make companies more efficient and their operations more environmentally friendly, but when offered to consumers, it can help them make more environmentally focused choices.

“There’re so many apps out there that large corporations can use to then lower their carbon footprint, but the data that they have doesn’t get shared all the time with the consumer,” Matthews Clarkson says.

With enough data, dashboards representing industries or regions can be created. This helps individuals cooperate on a larger scale.

Instead of people acting within their own bubble, unsure of how their actions are making a difference, they can see how their street, neighbourhood, even country, is performing.

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Digital Skills

But to fully leverage data, people need to know how to use it. Anyone interested in recycling knows how knowledge intensive it is – knowing what is recyclable and what isn’t, what goes in what bin, or how to dispose of e-waste.

The same applies to using digital skills to help the environment.

“I think the more the consumer becomes digital savvy, the more transparency can happen,” Matthews Clarkson says.

Unfortunately, digital skills are more represented in some demographics than others. And society is becoming increasingly stratified between the technological haves and have-nots.

“The digital divide is getting bigger,” Matthews Clarkson warns.

“I think senior executives at a lot of larger companies don’t understand technology, don’t understand the art of the possible. And because of that, they don’t have their foot on the gas at the same level.

“The people who have that mentality can’t solve the problems that we have in front us. If you don’t know what technology can do, how do you learn to fully leverage it?”

However, though daunting, learning digital skills is not difficult. The pandemic has shown how quickly people can adapt to a digital environment. Matthews-Clarkson points to several essential digital skills we need to fight climate change.

“Data is the first one,” she says. “Understanding data, what’s the terminology is, what does it mean. Programming is really important in general, to understand a little bit more about what programming is.

“Understanding e-commerce and how e-commerce works is also important, from the full supply chain model and logistics to e-commerce aspects. I think it’s very important that people understand how the whole Amazon model works.

“And understanding IoT. I’m a huge IoT player, and people don’t understand how many IoT devices that they interact with every day. Then the final one is security.”

Putting it Together

However, learning digital skills is just another way to put the onus back on individuals. To meet our climate change responsibilities, people need incentives to make environmentally friendly choices.

“There should be a reward, other than saving the planet – there has to be some financial reward,” Matthews-Clarkson says. “You could give consumers tax relief if they do their recycling, and that again, would be technology monitoring and managing it.”

She points to gamification as another way to incentivise people to take climate action.

“If we have payment rewards gamifying our climate change, that could be a huge difference.”

But perhaps most important is a fundamental change in perception. Too often, our digital world is seen as abstract and unknowable. We fail to connect our digital activity with a real-world cost.

Everything we do, every email we send, every photo we store, has a cost in electricity, server space, and infrastructure.

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With digital skills and data transparency come a greater understanding of the interconnected nature of the modern world.

One way to connect this to the real world, Matthews-Clarkson says, is to ascribe a physical or monetary cost to each digital action, such as five pence for each email sent.

“At the end of the week instead of telling me my digital time, you tell me how much money it costs for that infrastructure.”

Companies have access to massive amounts of data, both theirs and ours. Data is valuable – it is frequently touted as the new oil or soil, depending on who is writing the metaphor.

But in the battle for the climate, data is too valuable to hoard. Ensuring everyone is informed and can make the right decision for the environment means making data transparent, and digital technology is necessary for that.

“Innovative thinking, agile processes, technology and data, as part of technology, and that transparency of data, will move the dime.”