The CNRS is calculating digital environmental footprints

© jarmoluk / Pixabay -A +A Share this content Share on BlueskyShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on FaceBookSend by mailhttps://www.cnrs.fr/en/update/cnrs-calculating-digital-environmental-footprints Print https://www.cnrs.fr/en/update/cnrs-calculating-digital-environmental-footprints Breadcrumb Home Update The CNRS is calculating digital environmental footprints April 24, 2026 Corporate -A +A Share this content Share on BlueskyShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on FaceBookSend by mailhttps://www.cnrs.fr/en/update/cnrs-calculating-digital-environmental-footprints Every internet search, ChatGPT query or video watched online has an invisible cost, namely its environmental footprint. And yet assessing this impact remains complicated because of the lack of harmonised standards and accessible data. The Altimpact project, led by the CNRS, the Ademe and the Inria is working on this challenge. This article is published in the CNRS newsletter, the monthly meeting place for decision-makers with research. https://www.cnrs.fr Key takeaways for action Although the environmental footprint of the digital sector is growing, it remains poorly understood.A research programme partly funded by the CNRS has shed more light on the impact of various IT products and services.Industry players have embraced these calculation tools to reduce their own environmental footprint. Every day, millions of people browse the internet or use artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, to the extent that all of this has become commonplace even though seemingly innocuous actions of this kind do have a very real environmental impact. This is precisely why the issue is being studied by the Altimpact project initiative led by the CNRS, the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe) and the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria). A research team has specifically focused on measuring these hidden costs in the framework of this programme dedicated to assessing the digital sector’s ecological footprint.“Our starting point was the observation that more and more people are wondering how to assess the environmental impact of digital products, for example by using LCA1 . The problem is that these standards and calculation rules are not harmonised so calculations can't be compared with each another”, notes Emeline Pegon, a CNRS research engineer2 who worked alongside Laurent Lefevre from the Inria on the Altimpact project, adding that this lack of harmonisation penalises citizens and companies alike. Thomas de Latour, a digital sustainability engineer with the Ademe, agrees, pointing out that today's digital sector remains “largely unregulated, with players that are relatively scattered across the value chain”. One of the Altimpact project's objectives was precisely to establish product category rules (PCRs), with each set of rules establishing a standardised calculation methodology for specific products. Emeline Pegon explains that "we've worked on all aspects of this industry – from hardware to the networks that connect them, including video games and the graphics processors used in data centres. For each sub-sector, we've worked with experts in the relevant industry. And we've also drawn on the expertise of researchers for this work because we need to analyse a vast number of documents and run analyses on specific products”. 1Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a method for calculating a product’s environmental footprint, from the…

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