Our Digital Sustainability journey

Starting to embed digital sustainability principles into the work we deliver to clients is an important goal for the initiative in 2023. One of the first steps we've taken in this area is to encourage our developers - and others within the business - to improve their understanding of the environmental impact of the software code they write. This is a starting point for building, maintaining and running "greener" applications. 

We're pleased to report that 29 members of the team have completed a certification offered by the Linux Foundation focused on Green Software Principles. The course can be completed in less than half a day, and provides guidelines for what it means to be a green software practitioner.

As with many of the other sustainability initiatives we are introducing to Inviqa, many of the green software principles - such as simplification of code - have other business benefits.

Alongside the digital declutter, we have invited all of our users to adopt a search engine called Ecosia, a Chrome extension that uses the revenue generated from search activity to plant trees in 35 countries.

More than 20 million people around the world have downloaded the extension, leading to nearly 173 million trees being planted at the time of writing. One of our software engineers has been an early adopter of the tool. His 5,000 web searches so far have led to an estimated 98 trees planted to support carbon neutralisation.

To get buy in for our digital sustainability initiative from everyone in our business, our Head of People, Cathy Dearson felt that it was important to start with changing some simple things about the way everyone works. She kicked this off with a "digital declutter"; asking everyone to delete those old emails and files in Google Drive that they no longer need to store.

Like many of the sustainable ways of working we've already uncovered, there can be other business benefits too. Kicking off the digital declutter has started a conversation about cleaning up folders and documents containing data that we no longer need. A digital declutter should be in harmony with your data protection and GDPR obligations.

In the first month we have reduced Inviqa's data storage requirements by more than 0.25TB.

We've been working on our plans around digital sustainability since the end of 2022, but Earth Day felt like a great opportunity to go public and begin to talk about our programme of work. This year our business has an OKR focused on sustainability, and given the nature of our business - and the fact that our parent company Havas already does a great job in making our offices sustainable - we have decided to focus on Digital Sustainability. But what does that mean?

Digital sustainability in our business means adopting technology and processes that ensure we minimise our impact on the environment. This means writing cleaner code, designing digital products so they have less impact on the environment, and ensuring we only digitally store what we really need.

We've kicked off the initiative because we are increasingly aware of the impact the internet has on the environment. As the Sustainable Web Manifesto says: "If the Internet was a country it would be the fourth largest polluter."

Although the web can be a powerful tool for reducing carbon emissions - think of all the business travel eradicated by videoconferencing - the amount of power required to store and serve up data to the world is a concern.

Making the internet more sustainable is something we believe in as a business, and it's a goal that we think our client care about too.