What does that really tell us? Interpreting numbers in sustainability reports
Abstract
It is encouraging to see more and more studies published about the environmental footprint of the ICT sector. Unfortunately, the outcomes of those studies are often misinterpreted. In fact, one can look at the footprint of a product or activity in many different ways which all make sense but serve different purposes. It is very easy to mistake one purpose for another and thus derive completely wrong conclusions, which may lead to harmful—albeit well-intentioned—decision-making. I believe we can avoid those misunderstandings by clarifying the different methodological choices and their corresponding purpose. This mental framework helps draw correct conclusions from the growing corpus of sustainability studies. To facilitate this, we are developing a taxonomy for describing sustainable computing research questions and the methodology applied to study them. In this article, I summarize what I currently see as three of the most important methodological choices. Then, I’ll discuss a couple of examples from computer networks (my area of research) to illustrate how easy it is to misinterpret footprint numbers. And since there is no escaping it nowadays, I will close with some words on AI studies and numbers.
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BibTex
@misc{jacob2025What,
title = {What Does That Really Tell Us? {{Interpreting}} Numbers in Sustainability Reports},
author = {Jacob, Romain},
year = {2025},
month = sep,
eprint = {20.500.11850/784322},
eprinttype = {hdl},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/784322},
urldate = {2025-09-29},
}Research Collection: 20.500.11850/784322
Slide Sources: https://gitlab.ethz.ch/projects/59785