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Contribution Details

Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings No
Title The material side of virtualization
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Lorenz Hilty
Editors
  • Jorge Marx-Gomez
  • Michael Sonnenschein
  • M Möller
  • H Welsch
  • Claus Rautenstrauch
Presentation Type keynote
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed No
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
ISBN 978-3-540-71334-0
ISSN 1863-5520
Page Range 5 - 6
Event Title ITEE 2007
Event Type conference
Event Location Oldenburg, Germany
Event Start Date January 23 - 2007
Event End Date January 23 - 2007
Series Name Environmental Science and Engineering
Place of Publication Berlin, Heidelberg
Publisher Springer
Abstract Text The Environmental Informatics community could recently celebrate its 20th anniversary. The application of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to problems of environmental research and management has made considerable progress and contributes to sustainable development. Moreover, ICT has the potential to virtualize processes that would otherwise consume considerable amounts of material and energy; virtual meetings, for instance, could avoid 97-98% of the CO2 emissions of physical meetings.The time, space, material and energy needed to provide a unit of ICT service have roughly decreased by a factor of 1000 since the first PC was sold. It seems therefore natural that researchers and industries using ICT in the environmental field ignore the environmental impacts caused by ICT hardware – they are just negligible compared to the environmental benefits that can be realized with the applications.Paradoxically, it is the progress in ICT hardware efficiency that has made ICT a part of the problem, too. The global mass and energy flows caused throughout the hardware life cycle are increasing due to the wide-spread use of ICT products and their decreasing useful lives. The environ-mental problems caused by the production, use and disposal of ICT hard-ware are solvable in principle; they are not as hard as the discrepancy between - e.g. - growing mobility and CO2 reduction goals. But problems can only be solved if they are not neglected.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1007/978-3-540-71335-7_3
Other Identification Number merlin-id:6465
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